Small Business MBA

Simple Business Transformation

Optimize Your Small Business for Success

Transformation.

It is simple word with powerful meaning. Our understanding coming only from the context it is used. Harnessing the power, using it for your organization’s benefit, is the key to growth and sustainable success for the future.

Even the most elemental forms of transformation can have monumental effects. Simply reducing the temperature of water by a few degrees transforms a docile fluid into a solid that has the power to reduce mountains to dust.

Nature gives us other examples of more complex transformations, converting caterpillars into the completely different form of a butterfly. Each step in the lifecycle tuned to its specific tasks, but neither being able to complete the other’s portion.

What we learn in nature serves us well in the human domain. Simple changes, well planned, can have massive effects on your business. Likewise, operational models that once served the business well may now be obsolete, requiring a new form to arise to meet the challenges of the next step in your organization’s evolution.

While each organization’s journey is unique, there are certain commonalities that cross all industries and sectors. Beginning well before even the smallest controlled changes can happen, an agreement on the need to change must occur. This is not to say that it must be welcomed or embraced, but it must be accepted as a positive progression.

Most humans and organizations are reluctant deviate from the status quo, even if the conditions are less than optimal. For organizational transformation to be successful, acceptance of the change — however tacit — must occur from affected parties.

While acceptance of the inevitability of change is required, how can we know what the scope and scale of the change will be? For that matter, how do we know we need to change at all?

Harness the Power

Transformation planning starts by engaging leadership in the transformation process. Through this primary conversation, the needs of the organization — and the cultural ability to execute the change — are mapped out and a consensus reached. Failing to arrive at this common understanding does not necessarily mean a failure overall. The expectations, resources, organizational will, and/or finances may not be correctly leveled across the breadth of the impacted groups.

Simple foundational tasks such as defining ‘success’ as it relates to the transformation, or fully understanding what drivers are pressing on the organization necessitating change, require a strategic insight into all areas of the business. That knowledge, along with direction and guidance, must be evenly communicated throughout all levels of affected stakeholders.

At this initial stage, one factor that is often overlooked is the formation of a commonly understood vocabulary to communicate ideas seamlessly across the organization. Often, agreement is not met simply due to confusion over scale, scope or understanding. It may seem self-evident, but groups that fail to have a common understanding of terms often have difficulty coming to a shared understanding of transformation.

This corporate lexicon allows disparate parties to form a picture of the organization’s change plans and see their part in it as well. By understanding their role, and how it affects the success or failure of the overall transformation, stakeholders can internalize their value to the program.

At this stage, tooling helps to focus the acceptance process by creating and controlling a common vocabulary, mapping out goals and objectives, as well as building a high-level map of organizations and their contribution to the overall strategy. Delivering strategic insight into change, tools can help bring disparate and often dissenting stakeholders into the group and form a solid foundation from which to build the future organization.

Start Where You Are

Surveyors use a known, fixed point to begin any measurement. A solid foundation for building your organization’s transformation is no different. A baseline understanding of the available human capital, technology and operational assets is critical to understanding the capabilities of the organization.

While an in-depth survey of the existing environment may not be practical, the insight gained from assessing the starting position is required when determining the amount of effort — human, technical and financial — needed to accomplish the change.

Additionally, these maps provide a cohesive picture of the full landscape of the business environment. Using the interconnections of groups, internal and external, as well as the depth of technical and business capabilities delivered by each, gives a confident appraisal of the ability to execute the desired strategy.

Tooling allows for an understanding of the desired end-state (or even interim transitional states), overlaid with resources, delivered through process, supported by technology, and focused on solutions rather than products. This business and technical insight gives an organization its best opportunity to successfully transform their future.

Meaningful Change

Transformation can quickly become chaotic. Without proper controls, disparate areas may move at different speeds — and worse, in different directions. Orchestrating that change though responsive governance is another key to successful transformation.

Maintaining a central repository for change allows all areas to visualize their role in the effort. This understanding facilitates change by providing global insight to strategic managers, while also allowing decisions to be pressed to the lowest level possible. In doing this, alignment of tactical activities to strategic direction is maintained at all levels of the organization.

Constructing actionable projects that support the overall corporate objectives allows the organization to move forward in a calculated, managed way. Tooling provides a place to build projects, measured against the value they provide to the overall objectives and move the entire business forward through the change.

Change for the Better

Regardless of the scale or scope of the change, the strategic insight provided by tool-based, repository modeling supports managed transformation. Understanding change at its highest levels and being able to provide tactical business insight into the drivers, vocabulary and direction of the organization, paints a common picture for success that can be followed, monitored, measured and managed. Mapping the underpinning technology provides operational technical insight to construct the company’s backbone, building a strong foundation for success.

Whether a subtle change or major transformation, planning and communication are the keys that separate chaotic failure from graceful evolution.

David Daniel is a former EDS, IBM and PwC CxO level management consultant. He takes his years of big business experience and tailors it for small businesses and startups across the business spectrum.

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