Digital enablers #3: Always-On Execution (digital at scale 5/6)

Digital leaders follow three organizing practices to ensure they have in place the governance processes necessary to drive change: 

(1) product-led platform teams; (2) cross functional lighthouse teams; and (3) digital control tower.


This is an excerpt of the publication below, with the title above, focusing on the related topic.


The Keys to Scaling Digital Value


MARCH 16, 2022 
By Karalee Close, Marc Roman Franke, Michael Grebe, Hrishi Hrishikesh, and Kristi Rogers
BCG commissioned by GOOGLE


Always-On Execution


Digital proficiency is not a permanent state, nor is digital transformation a one-off project or program.

Technological advances, competition, and disruption mean that organizations need to continually improve to reinforce their competitive positions and resilience.

Companies need effective governance and an always-on mindset to continue scaling current digital solutions while also searching for the next solutions to scale.

Execution requires organizing around product-led agile teams that work on lighthouse projects, using flexible budgets.

Teams must constantly test and improve minimum viable products until the extent of their value becomes apparent.

Organizations should adapt their priorities as context changes and as challenges occur. Leaders need to address roadblocks quickly and drive “fail-fast-learn” behavioral change into the wider organization.

Each challenge that they successfully tackle contributes to the achievement of broader strategic goals, not just to the incremental improvement of a unit or function.


Companies need effective governance and an always-on mindset to continue scaling current digital solutions while also searching for the next solutions to scale.


Organizations should adapt their priorities as context changes and as challenges occur.


As our research shows, digital leaders follow three organizing practices to ensure they have in place the governance processes necessary to drive change. (See Exhibit 9.)



First, more than 80% of leaders have established an operating model that consists of cross-functional business and tech teams, and about 60% organize around product-led platform teams.


First, more than 80% of leaders have established an operating model that consists of cross-functional business and tech teams, and about 60% organize around product-led platform teams.

The benefits are numerous and substantial:

  • Better business and tech collaboration for improved product development
  • Agile product launch cycles that can double, triple, or quadruple speed to market
  • Lower overhead and more built-in mechanisms for continuous improvement, which can multiply productivity by a factor of two to four
  • Digitization of operations and customer experience, to improve the cost-income ratio by 10% to 15%
  • A more agile work environment that appeals to high-performing employees and aids recruitment

A leading logistics company wanted to transform itself from an asset-driven organization into a digital customer-focused service organization and reduce its costs and time to market.

It shifted to a product-led operating model with joint tech and business ownership through cross-functional teams. The company organized technical capabilities into product domains reflecting different customer needs, with underlying systems feeding into multiple products. This approach enabled the company to offer more standardized products and customer solutions. The cross-functional teams worked in an agile setup, encouraging innovation and making it easy to scale up teams when new products were released. The company reduced time to market by 30%, improved customer satisfaction, and scaled tailored customer experiences more quickly, while lowering unit costs by 20%.


The second organizing practice, followed by almost 90% of leaders, is to pilot innovations using cross-functional lighthouse teams. 

In our experience, transformations are most successful when they initially focus on one or two lighthouse projects that can illuminate a path for others, and then iterate and adapt until they can successfully scale. Leaders exercise discipline in determining quickly which projects have value (or the most value) within a preset time frame and concentrating on those while terminating others in favor of new lighthouses.


The second organizing practice, followed by almost 90% of leaders, is to pilot innovations using cross-functional lighthouse teams.


Third, about 60% of leaders use a digital control tower or center of excellence-a centralized team in charge of all digital initiatives-to steer value by allocating resources to meet value-creating targets while cutting funding for unsuccessful or slow-moving initiatives.

Businesses that transform successfully leverage fast and simplified decision making. They use the right KPIs-often all new ones-to monitor progress toward outcomes. An effective control tower that tracks the KPIs and keeps everyone on the same page with respect to progress smooths the journey and helps identify and remove obstacles quickly and effectively.


Third, about 60% of leaders use a digital control tower or center of excellence-a centralized team in charge of all digital initiatives-to steer value by allocating resources to meet value-creating targets while cutting funding for unsuccessful or slow-moving initiatives.


A top industrial goods manufacturer implemented its digital transformation strategy by identifying high-visibility lighthouse projects in each of its strategic priority areas and securing strong CXO alignment and support.

Using an MVP approach, the company developed and released multiple new digital products within six months, radically improving its GTM capability and surpassing its main competitor in key performance metrics within one month of launch. All new projects were built on cloud-native data platforms and cloud-based infrastructure. By scaling these lighthouse projects, the company drove significant customer experience improvements across the digital commerce channel.

Originally published at: https://www.bcg.com

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