Category Archives: Project Management

Digital Transformation, Project Management

Digital [Invention] Drivers

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‘Necessity is the mother of invention’. Practicality is a driver of necessity. The earliest concept of the modern day monetary system, metal coins, can be traced back to 600 BC, the Lydian Empire. Coins reigned supreme until the 11th century when the Song dynasty invented paper money ….. paper revolutionized the way that people could carry around their wealth without weighing them down! Ease and convenience are powerful USP’s (unique selling points).

Digitization, 1 and 0’s, paperless money is now starting to dominate our daily lives. The proportion of cashless transactions increases every year with over 70% of Asian and European payment transactions now going paperless. Whilst there may be cultural acceptance differences across the countries, the ease and convenience of ‘tapping’ your card or phone is now a digital cultural norm.

Foundational to the digitization enablement is the change in underlying process and platforms needed to support each ‘revolution‘ step. This is complex and often requires a mindset change. Under the digital transformation ‘call to action’, we refer to this as ‘digitalization’, or the ‘digitalization journey’. Digitalization involves the adaption and re-engineering of processes to balance user outcome benefits with business policies and procedures to ensure secure, consistent and robust controls. User adoption is improved by making the process easy and convenient.

What is the next tech wave?

The news is awash with the recent Microsoft investment in ChatGPT. Personally I believe we are still in that hype phase; and have yet to fully realize the benefit potential of using a ‘super charged’ chatbot to make the process easier and more convenient for the user. I articulate the challenges of AI in my last article, “The Age of AI: What’s Procurement’s fate?“.

As we close out 2022 and fast-forward 2023, my ongoing outlook is that we remain constrained by the complexity of the process being addressed and whether the user themselves are able to accept a new operational/ cultural narrative. The art of ‘digitalization’ remains, as ever, critical to success.

Confused by the digital tech talk. Share you perspective.

Digital Transformation, Project Management

New Year Resolution

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This is the Chinese year of the rabbit. There are number of business technology trends being predicted to help kick off 2023. Thank you to those that are sharing – there are so many exciting potentials for these solutions to add value, however I am reminded of the race between the rabbit and tortoise.

This cautionary tale reminds us that ‘slow and steady’ wins the race. There is a temptation for organizations to prioritize time, solution deployment, ahead of all other factors. The pressure to deliver ‘something ‘, ‘anything’ to meet management expectations is not only counter productive; it can result in teams burning energy needlessly. The drop out with team members chasing dead ends, loses momentum and motivation, and results in team churn and failed deliverables. This is equivalent to the rabbit tiring and needing to take a nap!

Steadiness and consistency will let you win like the tortoise did.

What’s your new year resolution?

Change Leadership, Digital Transformation, Operating Model, Project Management

The Danger of back office Digital Transformation without Balance

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With all new technologies, there is a danger that they get misapplied. misused and abused. Given the drive to digitalize the back office and deliver ROI, there can be a lack of consideration and practical understanding on how policies, people and processes are optimized.

Finance and Procurement functions measure spend managed by the team, encouraged by compliance and governance committees, to steer towards a ‘one size fits all’ approach in how the technology platform is configured. This usually leads to an overstretch of available resources, creation of process bottlenecks and a failure by finance and procurement to service the business adequately. The result is seen as an over promise and under deliver, and the technology is blamed.

This is not a technology problem, rather reflects the challenge of how the technology was implemented. Organizations must spend time to get into the detail on how the stakeholders buy; seeking to differentiate and simplify the different sourcing channels that can become configured correctly in the technology platform, and supplemented as appropriate, with complementary solutions. The output defines the new target operating model, matched with organization’s capability, to deliver value add across the end-to-end process without hampering one function over the other.

Together with investment in change management and all that it entails, digital transformation becomes a journey that starts with this first purposeful step.

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Change Leadership, Project Management

Chicken or Egg – Which came first?

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Organizations seeking system digitalization often want to know the sequence of steps required to set-up a project. The order is less important, there is more than one right way, but there needs to be an inherent business understanding required to determine the height and depth of the leap required to deliver business change.

The foundational understanding of what you have as a start point, As-Is, and assessing both appetite and ability, for a new To-Be process is critical in ensuring the organization can implement a successful change. It is not unusual for a software solution to be selected, and then handed over to be implemented. The challenge is then to create a strategy and plan to balance people, process and system elements in an optimal way. For example, you can have the best people, but if your process is flawed and/ or your system inadequate, then performance will be poor. Contrary, you can have the best system, but if your organization lacks the skills, and /or people are not trained to use the new system or process, adoption and performance will be poor.

As with the chicken or egg dilemma, a circle that has no beginning, a better question should be how far can we jump and what will enable us to jump further.

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