Opportunity Assessment: Transforming Problems to Potential

Over the last few weeks, you’ve identified your desired destination and your current location. You’ve assessed the state of your vehicle, your travel readiness, and the potential risks associated with the trip. Now it’s time to review all the information and create a detailed list of goals for your trip, considering your time, budget, and priorities. Ideally this will be done by a professional travel agent, but with some time, research, and a little bit of know-how, it can be done independently.

When it comes to planning your digital transformation (DX) journey, this step is called a Transformational Opportunity Assessment. It takes the raw information from all the previous assessments, and forges it into clear, prioritized opportunities for transformation. It’s the beginning of your transformational roadmap, and the crucial step towards turning problem areas and inefficiencies into projects and opportunities. Are you ready? Let’s get started.

Metamorphosis: Transforming Issues into Opportunities

This assessment is the culmination of all previous reviews and assessments. It analyzes the information collected on your organization’s vision, processes, technology, maturity, and risks. It aims to make sense of this data and mold it into actionable opportunities, which can then be transformed into clearly defined projects. To accomplish this, carefully examine each problem area and ask yourself these three questions:

1. What is the root cause, and what would it take to fix it?

While it may be easy to identify issues on the surface, it takes no small amount of skill, experience, and perspective to be able to trace the thread of that issue back to the underlying root cause. For example, as an engineer to order manufacturing company, you may have discovered challenges in aligning the designs from engineering to the customer’s specifications. This can lead to a lot of design rework and a significant amount of time wasted going back and forth between departments.

By tracing this bottleneck back to its origin, you discover that the specifications are managed by multiple people across multiple different platforms, making it nearly impossible to identify the current (and correct) customer specifications. While originally it may appear as an issue of bad designs not meeting specifications, the true cause is the poor data management.

One potential fix for this root cause is to build a connected data model for the specifications that can be used from the initial concepting phase all the way through the end of the project, centralizing the information and eliminating the need for managing multiple copies in multiple systems.

2. What is the impact of fixing (or alternatively, not fixing) the root cause?

The second question to consider as you review the issues is what the potential impact of fixing it would be. What is the value it would bring to your organization, both in terms of quality, efficiency, cost, and resources? In the example mentioned above, establishing a unified, standardized data model would lead to increased efficiency in engineering designs, reduced errors, and minimized manual data management.

Additionally, by incorporating a user-friendly front-end UI that facilitates data updating and analysis, the validation process could see substantial enhancement, reducing unnecessary iterations. Part of the process could also be automated, increasing efficiency even more. This would greatly reduce the amount of necessary rework.

Alternatively, you should also consider the impact of not resolving the issue. While some problem areas may be causing relatively low levels of disruption, in some cases these areas could be bleeding your organization dry every day. If the solution would result in high positive impact, or not fixing the issue will have a high negative impact, or both, it will be considered a high priority. If the solution has a minor positive impact (or it’s a minor negative impact if not fixed), it could be considered an “optional” feature but not a top priority.

3. Are there additional issues that must be addressed prior to resolving this matter?

This last question looks at the organizational dependencies. In certain situations, addressing a low-impact fix identified earlier may be necessary before tackling a high-impact area. For example, building a process to manage customer change requests may not have a high impact to the order management process. However, a customer change request process would include steps to validate that the customer’s changes get applied to the documented specifications in a timely manner. Without that process, having a refined solution for managing customer specifications will not be of much value as the specifications could easily become outdated and invalid.

---

Transformation is not easy, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. Take control of your project’s success today and schedule a free 30-minute consultation to find out how Victoria Fide can equip you for transformational success.

---

No Stone Unturned: Examining Areas for Improvement

Armed with these 3 questions, it’s time to sift through the previous assessments and identify the fixes to the root causes that have high impact, or that other high impact solutions are dependent on. We covered these assessments in previous articles, but here’s a summary of each.

Organizational Maturity & Risk

While technically these are two different assessments, (Organizational Maturity Assessment & Organizational Risk Assessment) they are very much intertwined. These assessments look at your organization’s capacity to adapt to change, whether your culture is change ready or change resistant, and whether the estimated changes are small and incremental or large and disruptive. As digital transformation is inherently about change, this is crucial to achieve sustainable success with your change efforts. Let’s take an example through the 3 questions posed above:

What is the root cause and what would it take to fix it?

In one of our assessments with a previous client, managers mentioned that training new hires was a challenge. Digging into this area of resistance, we found that it was less about the new hires being unwilling to adapt, and more about there being a lack of standardized processes combined with the challenges of a highly customized infrastructure and a young team. One solution was to identify and document a learning path for each role in the company to assist with not only the onboarding, but also the standardizing of responsibilities, tools, and processes. After the learning path had been defined, we recommended using a Learning Management System (LMS) to monitor the completion of the training and assist with managing the training documentation.

What is the impact of fixing (or alternatively not fixing) the root cause?

By implementing this solution and solving the root cause, managers will be able to onboard new hires much more efficiently which allows the managers to spend more of their time focused on strategic initiatives and allows the new hires to add value in a much shorter time frame. It also has the benefit of adding clarity to each role for existing team members. The impact of this is more satisfied employees and likely more efficient task completion. Lastly, by having an LMS, managers could track on-going learning of existing team members and easily make adjustments to the training documentation as roles and responsibilities change over time.

Not fixing this root cause could result in widespread impacts to managers, their team members, and even customers. Managers will continue to spend a large percentage of their time training new hires and resolving issues that arise from team members making mistakes or not fully understanding their responsibilities. Team members may be unclear about their responsibilities or how to complete their tasks which could result in time wasted on rework and ultimately a lower level of job satisfaction. This dissatisfaction and uncertainty usually leads to lower retention rates and a higher number of new hires which perpetuates this cycle. Lastly, customer satisfaction may be impacted when team members complete their tasks differently with a high variance in results and quality.

Are there additional issues that must be addressed prior to resolving this matter?

In this example, it was necessary for the organization to perform some additional analysis to determine their requirements for a Learning Management System (LMS). This required an understanding of the responsibilities, tools, and processes for the relevant roles before a full requirements list could be provided.

Processes

During your Enterprise Process Review, you will have identified areas of inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and pain points within your processes. In addition to examining these issues, you also should spend some time contemplating gaps. In other words, what are you not doing that is crucial for maintaining competitiveness? These can be identified by comparing your business goals (identified in your business & technology vision meetings) against your current state. This might look like getting into another market, improving the turnaround time for delivering competitive quotes to potential customers, or allowing customers to submit orders online.

Again, ask yourself: What is the root cause behind this issue or gap, and what would it take to fix it? What is the impact of fixing it versus not fixing it? And are there other areas that are dependent on fixing this issue? This will help score the issues and opportunities found within your processes and label them as high transformational priorities or simply “nice to haves.”

Technology

Finally, you want to examine the problem areas identified within your Enterprise Technology Review. This includes looking at any unsupported systems, your system health, and any system gaps. For example, what should you be doing that you’re currently not doing, that will support your business objectives?

For each issue or gap identified, make sure you are tracing the thread down to the root cause, identifying potential solutions, weighing the impact of the change, and whether there are other dependencies. By following these steps and asking these questions, you can prioritize your areas of opportunity and prepare to implement the necessary technology changes while also planning for “nice to haves” in the future.

---

---

The Road Ahead: Crafting Your Digital Transformation Path

Once you have applied the 3 questions to the issues identified in each area, you will have a collection of solutions. They’re not exactly projects, but rather the inception of projects. The next step is to sort them by priority, which we will dive into in detail next week. This entails evaluating each solution based on its alignment with strategic business objectives, its estimated ROI (This involves tasks like creating preliminary budget figures, obtaining estimates, and collecting quotes), and any identified dependencies.

Once you’ve set your priorities, you can start crafting a high-level roadmap. This marks the exciting phase where your broad organizational vision manifests into tangible, actionable tasks. As you begin to see the road ahead, you can then take steps along your path toward a more effective and successful business.

While this Transformational Opportunities Assessment can be done independently, it takes no small amount of time, skill, experience, and perspective to be able to forge raw data into clear opportunities and solutions. If you find yourself in need of a travel advisor, Victoria Fide’s team of digital transformation experts regularly provides assessments and transformational recommendations based on your organization’s goals, uniqueness, and priorities.

Schedule a free consultation with us today, and subscribe for more detailed, practical guides to equip you with the tools and knowledge you need to lead your organization through a self-sufficient, sustainable DX journey.

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Mail