People perspective
The people perspective serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth and learning, where change becomes business-as-normal. In addition to culture, the focus is on organizational structure, leadership, and workforce. This perspective comprises seven capabilities.
Common stakeholders include CIO, COO, CTO, cloud director, and crossfunctional and enterprise-wide leaders
1. Culture evolution
Evaluate, incrementally evolve, and codify organizational culture with digital transformation aspirations, and best practices for agility, autonomy, clarity, and scalability.
To succeed in digital transformation, you’ll need to leverage heritage and core values, while incorporate new behaviors and mindsets that attract, retain, and empower a workforce that’s invested in continuously improving and innovating on behalf of customers.
Maintain a long-term focus, obsess over customers, and boldly innovate to meet their needs. Institute an organization-wide approach to recognizing behaviors and goals for all roles that help shape desired culture. Consider rapid experimentation, agile methodologies, and cross-functional teams to drive ownership and autonomy, enable rapid decision-making, and minimize the need for excessive approvals or bureaucracy.
2. Transformational leadership
Strengthen your leadership capability and mobilize leaders to drive transformational change and enable outcome-focused, cross-functional decision-making.
To succeed with cloud transformation, leaders must put as much focus on the people side of change as they do on technology, because without an effective
blend of technical and business leadership, transformation may slow down or stall.
Gain active and visible executive sponsorship from both technology and business functions, who will make critical decisions on strategy, vision, scope, and resources, and take actions on communication, coalition building, and holding teams accountable for results.
At both the executive and program levels, ensure that business and technology leaders co-develop, co-lead, and co-deliver culture change strategies. Confirm that each layer of management delivers clear and consistent communications to align the organization on cloud value, priorities, and new behaviors. Consider evolving cloud leadership function through a transformation office and/or a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to evangelize and drive transformation efforts with codified patterns for consistency and scalability. Incrementally evolve this function to meet current needs as progress through transformation journey.
3. Cloud fluency
Build digital acumen to confidently and effectively leverage the cloud to accelerate business outcomes.
The requirement for an exceptional workforce goes beyond adapting to a digital environment, and the greatest challenge is not the technology itself, but rather the ability to hire, develop, retain, and motivate a talented, knowledgeable, proficient, and high-performing workforce.
Given the rapid pace of technological innovation, address overall training strategy as it relates to timing, tooling, and technology training, and then assess existing cloud skills to develop a targeted training strategy.
Implement a skills guild to help generate excitement and build momentum for transformation journey. Champion data literacy, to advance talent skills and knowledge in data analytics.
Combine virtual, classroom, experiential, and just-in-time training, leverage immersion days, and validate skills with formal certifications. Implement mentoring, coaching, shadowing, and job rotation programs. Set up communities of practice that own specific domains of interest. Reward individuals for sharing knowledge, and formalize processes for knowledge elicitation, peer review, and ongoing curation.
4. Workforce transformation
Enable talent and modernize roles to attract, develop, and retain a digitally fluent, high-performing, and adaptable workforce that can autonomously drive key capabilities.
To succeed in cloud transformation, take a proactive approach to talent enablement planning beyond traditional HR to include C-suite leadership, and modernize approaches to leadership, learning, rewards, inclusion, performance management, career mobility, and hiring.
You need a diverse and inclusive workforce with the appropriate mix of technical and non-technical skills. Identify gaps in roles and skills across entire organization and develop a workforce strategy that will improve organizational cloud capability. Leverage talent with digital skills, and those who are eager to learn, and make an example of them. Strategically consider the use of partners and managed service providers to temporarily or permanently augment workforce.
To attract new talent, build a strong employer brand by publicly promoting digital vision and organizational culture, and use it in recruiting strategy, social networking channels, and external marketing.
4. Change acceleration
Accelerate adoption to the new ways of working by applying a programmatic change acceleration framework that identifies and minimizes impacts to people, culture, roles, and organization structure when moving from current to future state.
Cloud transformation creates widespread changes across business and technology functions. Organizations that apply a programmatic end-to-end change process that is structured, integrated, and transparent achieve higher rates of success with value realization and adoption of the new ways of working.
Customize and apply a change acceleration framework from project onset to enable organizational alignment, create a shared enterprise reality, and reduce waste from the process. Align and mobilize cross-functional cloud leadership. Define what success looks like early in the journey. Envision the future by assessing your organization’s readiness for cloud through impact assessments. Identify key stakeholders, cross-organizational dependencies, key risks, and barriers to transformation. Develop a change acceleration strategy and roadmap that address risks and leverage strengths comprised of leadership action plans, talent engagement, communications, training, and risk mitigation strategies.
Engage the organization and enable it with new capabilities to increase acceptance of the new ways of working, learn new skills, and accelerate adoption. Track clearly defined metrics and celebrate early wins. Establish a change coalition to leverage existing cultural levers that can help you generate momentum. Make changes stick with continuous feedback mechanisms as well as rewards and recognition programs.
5. Organization design
Assess organization design for alignment with the new cloud ways of working, and evolve as progress through transformation journey.
As you leverage the cloud to digitally transform, ensure organization design supports core strategies for the business, its people, and operating environment. Establish a case for change and assess if organization design reflects the desired behaviors, roles, and culture that have determined are key elements to business success.
Determine if the way organization is structured and run, in terms of team formations, shift patterns, lines of reporting, decision-making procedures, and communication channels, still supports desired business outcomes. Design the new model and implement it by applying change acceleration framework. Consider establishing a centralized team that is built to evolve over time, and which will initially facilitate and enable the transition to a cloud operating model that may be tailored to vision.
Consider trade-offs between centralized, decentralized, and distributed structures, and align organization design to support the strategic value of cloud workloads. Clarify the relationships between internal and external teams (using managed service providers).
6. Organizational alignment
Establish ongoing partnership between organizational structures, business operations, processes, talent, and culture to enable enterprise rapid adaptation to market conditions, and the ability to capitalize on new opportunities.
To augment cloud value realization, organizational alignment serves as a bridge between technology and business strategy so that technology changes are embraced by the business units that produce business outcomes.
Prioritize business outcomes like operational resiliency, business agility, and product/service innovation. Enable talent to work autonomously, focus on key objectives, make better decisions, and improve productivity. Get leadership commitment on the early application of a change acceleration framework so that people capabilities in leadership agility, workforce transformation, talent enablement, culture, and organization structure are integrated from the start.
Set measurable targets, joint goals, and mechanisms for cloud adoption, and create expectations for skill development at the role level to generate sustainable change ownership. Take a top-down approach to develop shared values, processes, systems, working styles, and skills to collectively drive business outcomes, and break down functional silos. Tie innovation efforts to customer experience. Recognize and reward those who continuously adopt and innovate.
