Evaluating your organization's readiness for digital transformation involves three critical areas: assessing your overall preparedness, analyzing the current user experience, and planning for business process optimization while investigating the state of your data. In a previous project readiness blog, we discussed the importance of understanding your organization's needs and desires, defining success metrics, and designing a seamless, enjoyable user experience to empower your workforce. By understanding where your employees stand today, you can build applications that are intuitive and add purpose to their work.
In this blog, we will expand on these foundational activities, ensuring your project team’s readiness to help avoid bottlenecks and gotchas that can derail your implementation. Before configuring cloud-based solutions, you need to understand how your workforce uses the current technologies and the structure and quality of your data.
Perform Usability Studies
A usability study can be helpful when defining success criteria. Before the project starts, assess your organizations’ performance metrics to form a baseline.
Consider questions like:
- How long does it take, and how many people are involved in completing a particular process?
- How long does it take to issue an offer letter?
- How many days pass between receiving a good and paying a supplier invoice?
Break down a business process into the steps each role performs. Focus on steps involving the most users and evaluate how each organization executes the task. Interview employees about their process, documenting their challenges and the time it takes to complete the last step. Identify any impediments and where tasks are often abandoned.
Assess your employees' responses to statements such as:
- The system’s capabilities meet my requirements to perform this task.
- Using the system is a frustrating experience.
- The system is easy to use.
- I spend too much time fixing errors associated with this task in the system.
If possible, observe employees performing the task and take notes. Conduct a time study to document the duration of the task. Synthesize observations, average the task completion times, and aggregate responses. You could also create a corporate-wide online survey to assess organizational performance throughout your company, agency or university.
A usability study is not a one-time event. It should be repeated throughout the project, especially during the Validation (Testing) stage. Conduct a final study after Go Live to validate the time and money invested were worthwhile.
Key questions to consider after the project:
- Have the impediments been eliminated?
- Does it take less time and fewer people to complete the task?
- What are the users' perceptions of the change?
Reducing time and the number of people involved substantiates the investment. Moreover, an application that meets your workforce's needs, ensures compliance, eliminates rework and frustration, and improves data accuracy achieves value realization and accelerates the return on investment.
Optimizing Your Business Processes
Create an inventory of all your business processes. Start with current state process flow diagrams, even if they are incomplete or outdated. They provide a foundation for discussion and will help guide the next steps.
- Engage Business Owners: Enlist your business owners to drive discussions about the future state of processes. If you've conducted persona and journey sessions, you already understand stakeholder expectations for the new solution.
- Identify Bottlenecks: Part of this organizational assessment should unpack your current processes and address bottlenecks and internal control issues. Look for manual work or redundant data entry that can be eliminated. Future state process flow diagrams can help visualize potential improvements and identify who performs each task.
- Streamline Processes: Regularly question future state flows. Can the process be streamlined further? Are all approval levels necessary, or can some oversight be managed through reports? Reassess organizational roles to ensure tasks are initiated by the appropriate individuals. Consider if any paper-based steps are still relevant in a digital platform.
- Embrace Self-Service: Evaluate if certain tasks, like address changes, can be handled by employees or managers instead of HR team members. This shift might be possible due to system improvements, security updates, or data sensitivity considerations. Many companies successfully adopt a self-service approach with well-trained and supported employees. Determine if this could work for your organization and discuss it before designing and testing new applications.
- Leverage AI Opportunities: Explore where artificial intelligence can be applied. For example, in recruiting, AI can screen resumes, analyze candidate responses, and evaluate job fit. Consider how automation can enhance the onboarding process. During the pre-planning and organizational assessment period, document AI possibilities and gauge stakeholder receptivity. Part of this activity must involve defining your AI governance to establish rules of engagement, oversight, and the decision-making process regarding how this technology will be implemented and managed.
Assess How Your Organizations Use Data
Regardless of how elegant and streamlined your processes are and how well-trained and eager your employees are, your business operations will still be stymied if you fail to simplify and harmonize your data. Entering different codes for the same department across various systems leads to errors and endless reconciliations. Additionally, poor data design hampers analytical insights.
- Structure Your Data: Proper data structuring enables consistent and reliable reporting and allows information to flow easily between applications, reducing maintenance costs. Assess how different organizations use key data elements and ensure consistent usage. Address any issues with data interaction between HR and Financial systems.
- Take Inventory: Identify common data elements and where they reside. Determine who owns and consumes this data. Consider the impact on user populations when changing data values, especially regarding how information is presented in reports and dashboards.
- Update Data Dictionary: Create or update your data dictionary to clarify the purpose of key data elements like employee ID, department, location, and cost center. These terms may vary across departments and systems. Assess how different organizations make business decisions based on their reports.
- Simplify Chart of Accounts: Use this pre-project period to simplify your chart of accounts, leveraging roll-ups and hierarchical coding structures. This step ensures better data management and reduces complexity.
- Data Conversion and Archiving: Determine how much data needs to be converted and what should be archived. Decide how archived data will be stored and retrieved, and identify which organizations need access to this data.
- Establish Data Governance: Develop a data governance policy that addresses data sensitivity and security concerns. This policy should be vetted with your leadership team to ensure comprehensive data management.
Conclusion
The ultimate purpose of assessing your organizations’ readiness is to define what you want to achieve before you begin your implementation. After understanding your stakeholder needs and hesitations, you can design a user experience that will be more readily embraced. Deciding who owns the process and the data will facilitate collaboration and validation of your project objectives. Sketching out your technology landscape is also beneficial as you will need to determine which systems will stay and which will be mothballed.
You want your investment of time and resources to deliver business outcomes that help your business grow and deliver job satisfaction. The Groove has decades of experience assessing organizations and facilitating project readiness workshops for our clients. If you have not had the chance to address these readiness activities, the guidance of a trusted advisor is invaluable. Let’s talk. Let’s make this happen. Let us help you get ready for a successful, value-driven implementation.