The Tech Conundrum

Sitting in the kick-off meeting of a US$70 million digital transformation project turned out to be an educational experience.

The project was doomed from day one.

The ask: rebuild the company’s core systems from the ground up.

The top-five consulting firm brought in as the system integrator recommended a lift-and-shift approach — build the new tech stack on the side with ring-fenced teams, and then, when everything was ready, shift everyone over.

“We’re not going to do that,” said the subsequently fired executive (who walked away with a fat package anyway). “We’re going to have our digital transformation teams work alongside our BAU (business-as-usual) teams.”

Well, it was an unmitigated disaster. Little change management, poor communication, a horrible attempt to hybridise Agile and Waterfall into a bastardised form of WAgile, no buy-in to the strategy — and the list goes on.

But it went deeper than that. It could best be described by the phrase: trying to fly the plane and build it at the same time.

This is a common problem in businesses: can we maintain the status quo while building a new future?

The answer is tricky: you can, but only if you separate the new work from the status quo.

At its heart, the challenge is this: you cannot ask status-quo teams to build the new world at the same time.

You have to create enough separation so that they can do BAU work over here while contributing to the new-world build over there.

This requires careful workforce management — deciding how people take on different kinds of work, and how alignment and cohesion are created across the organisation around the plan.

At the end of the day, digital transformation is people transformation. It is not just about deploying technology.