Five mistakes teams make with digital transformation

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit digital transformation.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Where it usually goes wrong

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• The technology is rarely the hard part
• Process and people determine whether it sticks
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Start with one workflow that visibly hurts. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Where to go from here

How to tell if yours is fine

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about digital transformation before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Start with one workflow that visibly hurts — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.