[Music] today we're talking about how to lead a business transformation as a consultant I have a lot of experience with companies transforming their processes or their programs and today what's happening is a lot of companies are looking for business transformation to maybe go to the cloud or implement a digital strategy or even implement agile processes but whether you're internal or external there are a lot of challenges that come on when you're doing a business transformation and some of the challenges you'll see is maybe a weak sponsor engagement maybe somebody who's not really there full-time on the engagement or can really make it a priority the second one is a lack of clearly defined roles maybe the people on the business transformation it's unclear who's responsible for what also a failure to assess the capabilities maybe there are people on the business transformation team or even in the organization so with the lack of understanding of their capability or even the capacity it's hard to get the program done there's also inconsistencies in communication maybe there's sporadic or maybe they're going to the wrong people for the wrong thing or maybe they're none at all then there's inaccuracies of the effort of estimations on the work required to do the transformation and here's a big thing the lack of the momentum to implement because typically a business transformation can last for months tip it may be typical to have a 15 month or 18 month engagement so you have to keep the team involved to go through and execute the transformation sometimes there's wrong timing of the implementation maybe by the time you go to implement their factors that change maybe timing of the market or something has implemented to change the industry and then there's the big one of letting go of legacy processes or even systems so let's take a look at some of the strategies to set up for success so the first one is to have a strategic vision getting the right strategic vision is critical having people know where your going why are you doing this transformation and ultimately what do you want the organization or the company to look like the second one is execution so execution is the hardest so you may have the plan to do it in the organization's but really getting people to adopt and execute it to really infuse it into the organization or the company can be hard some of the other challenges so you want to identify and handle your biggest challenges so for some companies a common one is for the leader to let go of part either a current or a past success the other one is customer demand so take a broad view of your customers demands because typically that's what you're looking at to drive the transformation is to meet the customers demands so a big thing to remember with the strategy is to use modern tools let go of some of the legacy tools legacy systems and adopt the modern ones that can support what's happening now so remember these best practices for planning for the transformation is remember the culture for some companies the part of the culture is maybe ownership or empowerment of their people and being customer-centric is just some examples the second one is people so a lot of times companies look at knowledge and mindset and companies now are going more from mindset over knowledge they feel like they can train people for knowledge but to have a mindset a positive mindset to get things done and really move the organization to where they want to be is very important also having clear objectives too for some companies it's to improve the client experience maybe getting time to market improve that time to market some of the success factors can be having a compelling why so for the people on the transformation team or even in the organization who have to adopt it there has to be a strong compelling why so if people can go all-in and then again a big thing is willing to let go of how you did things in the past so as you can see a project management software tool can be very helpful for you transformation and if you need one then sign up for our software now at projectmanager.com [Music] you