Is your company ready for its Transformation?

The resiliency of the communities across Texas despite the loss of life and property during their electric grid's recent failure is impressive. It was really unnecessary proof, given we're all a year into a pandemic.

Texas not being integrated into the Eastern and Western Interconnection for electricity resonated with me as an example of why we're generally better off collaborating for our everyday needs. 

Can a state, even a great one like Texas, build and maintain the expertise necessary to operate and maintain a standalone power grid? Does it have the related knowledge, time and skills to track and develop expertise in power generation, climate, operations, and cyber-attacks? Can it afford to do all those things with the required scale and resiliency?

My intent of referencing this very public event is to illustrate some shared themes as businesses of every size undertake Transformation. An activity that consistently calls on the Corporate Trinity: people, process and technology.

I submit that companies scaled back or stopped investing in the skills and behaviours required to succeed at Transformation right after the calendar moved past Y2K.

Large corporate projects generally fail to meet their charter goals; The spectacular failures miss growth targets and cause a decline in revenue. They waste years of effort, millions of measurable dollars and cause immeasurable opportunity costs. 

Fundamentally, such failures are systemic; They are born and raised from an organization's executive office and mature into a disabling condition over a prolonged period. They are a far greater force than can be found in a single person.  

Leaders raised to manage cost alone and governed by Boards and committees who lack the necessary understanding routinely and silently set a company back years through their actions.  

In the best of cases, this creates a reliance on external vendor help. In the worst, the company hires point skills at the lowest possible cost to demonstrate restrained action.  

In industries where these under-invested companies compete with juggernauts like Amazon, which have successfully built Transformation into their DNA, the time available to recover is very short.

Bringing in external help is not inherently wrong; it just needs to be done thoughtfully, thoroughly and managed to an outcome with clear, shareable and measurable intent.  

Suppose building integrated systems of software is not among your company's core competencies. Should you have an in-house team working with technology that nobody in the Executive understands?  

If you've recently added someone that does bring a new competency, did you plan to build up all teams so that they can execute on the new mandate?

If competency in Data, AI, ML and similar are critical to the business's future, then practiced skills in those areas need to be deployed at all company levels.

Demonstrated competency in critical thinking, communication, requirements and analysis, security, team-based development, testing, and support as table stakes—capabilities earned through mentorship and practice. The capstone skill is a holistic understanding of the resulting system and appreciation of its customer.

A business's Transformation is intricate work that involves goals, not timelines. There are often many end-to-end solutions that must interoperate with coordinated quality.  

Transformation is much more than counting the number of people certified on a specific methodology or adopting a SaaS or Cloud platform. It requires experienced leadership and a diverse set of skills applied in the context of your business.