Digital Transformation
High Performing Technical Teams
An overview of talent in Digital Transformation programs of large business organizations
Purpose of the Article
In this article, I introduce key technical leadership team members in the digital transformation programs.
I highlight major roles, performance culture, talent, interactions, blind spots, collaboration, communication, mentoring, coaching, innovation, and continuous learning.
High-performing teams are critical success factors for digital transformation programs.
Background
I am a technologist and a technical leader responsible for client success in complex digital transformation programs of large business organizations.
In addition, I published multiple books in this field. I enjoy sharing my experience with others to create serendipitous encounters.
A digital transformation ecosystem can consist of many interrelated teams with a wide variety of professionals covering various facets of the programs. There can be many roles and responsibilities in these programs.
These roles and responsibilities need to be known and understood clearly. Stakeholder management is a primary responsibility of transformation technical leaders.
Understanding team structures, dynamics, and many roles, and responsibilities require a considerable amount of effort and capability. Based on my experience, let me introduce the key dynamics in high-performing teams.
Importance of Technical Talent
Technical talent is one of the essential requirements for the success of digital transformation initiatives.
As technical leaders, we need to understand the value and importance of technical talent for our digital transformation programs. Without caliber technical talent, our digital transformation programs cannot progress and deliver results productively.
We must be very cautious about nurturing and keeping talent in our teams.
We need to make every effort to retain valuable technical talent in our teams. We cannot emphasize enough that talent is a crucial enabler of core products and services for modernizing and transforming enterprises.
Without talent, our business organizations cannot be competitive in their digital transformation goals. There is constant talent hunting in the industry to secure these scarce resources.
As technical leaders, it is our role to perform talent management and facilitation. We can encourage the team members, especially less junior team members to perform better and turn them into talented team players.
We can also pick up poor performance in our programs and help remove poorly performing employees and replace them with talented team members who can genuinely contribute to the digital transformation vision. Our success depends on high-performance teams consisting of talented members.
Team Performance
Digital transformation initiatives require team members who can perform and produce at the highest possible level. These team members must perform optimally at all times to meet the challenges of these programs.
Their skills and capabilities must be tested and validated to suit the type of work they are performing in our programs.
Building high-performance teams are critical for the success of our transformation programs. We need to create proactive and engaged local technical teams and a community of practices as give-back activities.
These high-quality teams and collaborative community of practices can generate innovative, high-quality solutions in an accelerated manner. They are ideal contributors to digital transformation goals.
As our teams are involved in complex technical matters, team members may have blind spots to understand the sophisticated dynamics. Blind spots can be hazardous in these complex endeavors.
The owner of the blind spot cannot see his or her blind spot unless using specific tools or assistance from someone else who is more experienced.
Habits and habitual thinking patterns are common causes of blind spots. Focusing on details without seeing the big picture can also cause cloudy thinking and ultimately dangerous blind spots.
However, as technical leaders, we need to look for big pictures from multiple angles and deep dive when needed hence can quickly identify blind spots and weaknesses experienced by our team members.
Technical leaders need to articulate situations with constructive feedback, lots of clarifying examples, metaphors, and similes. This influential articulation focus can help team members see their blind spots, understand their weaknesses, and turn them into strengths.
Related to blind spots, identifying hidden agendas and hidden costs are critical in these complex environments.
Taking necessary performance measures is essential in our transformation programs. Measures can be both qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative measures are data-driven and qualitative measures are usually related to our emotional intelligence.
We can manage across complex matrix structures in our organizations to integrate skills into our programs. As metric-oriented leaders, we need to use KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
We can use a team dashboard to see the trends and qualify and quantify progress in visual formats for the team members and the business stakeholders.
As roles model technical leaders, we can encourage other team members to create their dashboard and shared dashboard for the team activities.
Our teams must turn our program into a data-driven organization to measure the progress of digital transformation goals structurally and methodically.
Two key measures are customer orientation and support mechanisms. We ensure a customer-centric outlook is provided, focusing on continually improving client experience with measurable results.
We are expected to be the ‘thought leaders’ for customer support. Client focussed thought leadership is a critical need and demand in digital transformation environments, for changing cultures, and the overall transforming ecosystems.
Both tangible and intangible outcomes are essential for the success of digital transformation programs. These programs require outcomes iteratively rather than monolithic.
For example, some tangible outcomes can be virtualization of platforms, creating containers, creating reusable shared resources, reviewed products, and agreed services. Some intangible outcomes are happy customers and satisfied stakeholders.
As technical leaders, we need to pay special attention to providing measurable outcomes with the support of our technical team members. Transforming business environments present constant and rapid changes. We know that any change matters in the digitally transforming ecosystem.
These small and rapid changes lead to more significant measurable outcomes at later stages of the initiatives; for example, the systems may need to be fully automated, loosely coupled, service-oriented, software-defined, self-learning, self-managing, and self-healing are a few to mention this context.
Now that we understand the importance of team performance, let’s get to know the key technical leaders in the ecosystem
Technical Professionals for Transformation
As technical leaders, we work with many technical professionals involved in digital initiatives in large business organizations.
For example, we closely work with architects, designers, technical specialists, implementers, testers, and support administrators.
At the highest level, we work with the enterprise architects applying a rigorous enterprise architecture approach to help us with digital transformation initiatives.
Critically, if the business and enterprise architecture process go wrong in dealing with a digital transformation initiative, everything else goes wrong in the program.
All other architecture types, such as solution architecture, system architecture, integration architecture, and other architecture domains, are all dependent on the quality of business and enterprise architecture.
Apart from architecture, the subsequent activities in the digital transformation lifecycle are also adversely affected.
After a validated, business-focused, and pragmatic architecture supporting the digital transformation strategy, the design (both high level and detailed level) is the next vital aspect to be considered in the lifecycle.
As technical leaders, we participate in various forums such as the Architecture Review Boards and Design Authority forums. These forums are consisting of many architects, designers, and technical specialists.
For example, a Design Authority maybe consist of multiple architects with diverse expertise in different domains.
Usually, enterprise architects orchestrate the activities with their broad knowledge and understanding of the strategy, architecture, technical matters, and business.
Enterprise Architects govern the Design Authority by using their organizational skills coupled with other architectural skills and business understanding.
Enterprise architects heavily rely on business architects to understand business stakeholder dynamics. Let’s understand the role of enterprise architects as we must work with them day to day basis in our digital transformation programs.
Enterprise Architects
Enterprise Architects have strategic, architectural thinking, and design thinking skills.
These highly capable architects need to articulate the current enterprise environment to the sponsoring senior executives, set future enterprise environment goals, and show how to bridge the gap for digital transformation goals between these two environments.
At a high level, Enterprise Architects understand the overall digital transformation scope, requirements, and use cases of the solutions.
Besides, Enterprise Architects perform Viability Assessments which are critical to our digital transformation programs. These architects must regularly assess risks, issues, dependencies, and constraints considering strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Enterprise Architects are responsible and accountable for architectural and technical governance. Technical governance is an essential aspect of digital transformation initiatives. These programs require a particular governance model due to their complexity.
A dynamic and flexible governance model is essential for digital transformation initiatives. The traditional stringent and extreme rule-based oppressive governance models can be roadblocks to progress.
Agility principles are required for dynamic governance models.
Enterprise Architects usually perform the role of technical governance head in sizeable digital transformation programs. They can have formal governance roles. For example, these architects are tasked to run the architecture review boards or design authority forums.
Domain Architects
Domain Architects are usually assigned to a specific business domain and play various roles and responsibilities in digital transformation programs.
Domain Architects can architect a component or integrated component in their business units. Even though they are business focussed, they can also have a strong technical background covering various aspects of architecture such as infrastructure, applications, data, and security.
When we are working on a specific business unit problem, these domain architects can be instrumental in providing required guidance to our initiatives.
Infrastructure Architects
Infrastructure Architects are responsible for the underlying infrastructure such as network, servers, storage, platforms, and physical facilities such as data centers and communications.
Infrastructure architects are responsible for the plumbing of the digital world. As technical transformation leaders, we closely work with Infrastructure Architects as they are astute about the infrastructure components of our digital initiatives.
Application Architects
Application Architects are responsible for applications and middleware across the enterprise. Enterprises can have many standalone and integrated applications spanning multiple servers, domains, and geographic locations.
Application Architects understand the functionality, operability, supportability, integration, and migration of applications.
As technical transformation leaders, we closely work with Application Architects. They are critical resources in our programs.
Specialist Architects
This may sound like a misnomer, but there are undoubtedly specialist-level architects. Even though architects cover breadth, some architects cover depth by specializing in particular areas in the enterprise due to the extensive scope of the domains.
The most common specialty roles for architects are Security Architect, Data Architect, Information Architect, Network Architect, Mobility Architect, and Workplace Architect.
Some of these architects can also serve as subject matter experts or technical specialists which I cover in the next subtitle.
Technical Specialists
Technical specialists can have distinct technology expertise covering a broad spectrum of technologies in many technical domains. These specialists are technically eminent professionals in their chosen field. In some organizations, they are called distinguished specialists.
The terms technical eminence and distinguished refer to outstanding technical expertise recognized internally and externally in the business organization of a technical leader who is influential and high impact on both technical and business communities.
Some technical specialists can have strong industry skills, demonstrate thought leadership, and possess multiple domain expertise. These specialists are highly regarded and sought after for their views and contributions to digital transformation initiatives.
Leading digital transformation programs requires distinguishing technical factors in multiple technology domains with in-depth understanding to some extent. These groups of people are ideal talents contributing to the success of digital transformation goals.
These technical team members also need and depend on some business-focused team members as a bridge between technical and business domains. The best example of this role is a Business Analyst.
Business Analysts
Even though Business Analysts are not technical, technical leaders closely work with the Business Analysts in architecting and detailing the solutions.
Business Analysts are critical resources to translate business requirements to technical requirements working with business stakeholders, domain architects, and technical specialists.
Exceptional communication skills are essential for Business Analysts dealing with digital transformation initiatives. Their communication skills are well respected and sought after by their peers, managers, and customers.
Business Analysts are expected to communicate at all levels with confidence and ease. They must articulate the most complex situations and technical matters to all stakeholders in a language that those people can understand. Business Analysts must customize their messages based on audience profiles.
Mentoring and Coaching in High Performing Teams
Mentoring and coaching is a cultural shift and the essential requirement of modernizing and digitally transforming environments. There must be constantly nurturing and knowledge transfer from top to bottom.
Technical leaders must be mentors for their team members, extended team members, teams from partnering organizations, interns, students from universities, and even external people in other collaborating business organizations.
Technical leaders generously share knowledge and transfer them to anyone who needs such knowledge to utilize in digital transformation engagements. It is a collaborative effort and culture.
Technical leaders are also good at coaching peers, subordinates, and cross-team members by being a soundboard to them. Junior team members can be easily overwhelmed by the rapid pace of changes and the challenges of transformation initiatives.
Technical leaders are excellent listeners and even contribute to the well-being of team members by providing coaching sessions for stressful colleagues resulting in therapeutic outcomes. Digital transformation teams experience an enormous amount of stress, especially with accelerated delivery for high volume stakeholder and consumer demands.
Continuous Learning for High-Performance Team
Learning is a never-ending process in transformational environments leading toward the modernization of legacy enterprises and digitally transforming business programs.
Due to changing technology stacks, processes, and tools, as technical leaders, we must learn rapidly, efficiently, and in the right context. We must be able to curate our knowledge from multiple sources.
Technical leaders can have a wide variety of learning styles. Based on situations and conditions, these leaders need to learn formally and informally based on circumstances.
High-performing technical leaders can turn every possible interaction into a potential learning opportunity.
High-performing technical leaders can create learning opportunities not only for themselves but also for team members in the program. They can also teach other people actively and on-demand.
By teaching team members, these technical leaders even learn more and better. This new way of learning is critical to meeting the demands of transformation goals.
Conclusions
This novel and bespoke approach to high-performing teams can ignite innovation fires in demanding, frenetic, and complex digital transformation programs.
In this article, I described the intrapreneurial aspects of technical leaders. The impact and implications relate to large business organizations.
However, startup companies can replicate this bespoke culture in a smaller volume and size to create a high-performance team for entrepreneurial activities.
I elaborated on these points in the digital transformation handbook freely available to readers on Medium.
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As I am passionate about technology, leadership, and digital transformation, I shared my experience in several articles. These top 10 articles may extend the points from this article and provide you with additional insights and more comprehensive perspectives reflected from the real-life experience.
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