6 Things Every Project Manager Must Know About Digital Transformation

 

Are you leading one or more digital transformation projects? Be ready to embrace a new type of project management with more change-based leadership and individual transformation involvement than you have before.

1. You must move from the traditional project management triangle and adopt the new rectangle for the project involving change and transformation leadership.

   Digital transformation is not about one change but multiple changes that will    create the transformation. Your most effective management of time, cost        and scope can easily be sabotaged by disengaged individuals, making you      look like a novice.

2. Your team now extends beyond your traditional stakeholders in terms of your competitors, influencers, your clients, their kids, their friends and their little knuckle-head friend on Facebook.

    Digital transformation is about innovation and business efficiency.           Innovative ideas are born out of people’s experience, whoever they are. We have moved to a social era where social media trends, shares, and happenings shape our reality and possibilities. You get to use that as an extended resource.

3. You must and should go ahead and find out about the plan of other leaders in your organization, and it’s necessary to keep an eye on what they are doing.

With the many changes happening in different parts of your organization besides business-as-usual, expect any other ongoing plan to change at any time, impacted by the market, or whatever other factors. You don’t want to be aware of it last or after finding out how it impacted your agreed deliveries negatively. Also change in other part of your organization can impact positively your strategic plan, giving you leverage that you did not have to start with.

4. Don’t even think of complaining about your plan changing too often. Consider it the standard way. Like in point 3 above, be ready to change your plan, adjust it or reinvent it at any time. Your plan was one of the possible alternatives and should be adopted after proper strategic planning. At the same time, great strategic planning will allow you to choose another previously spotted possibility or to create one from nothing.

5. The vision is not only for the top executives, as project managers must own the vision as well whether you created it or not. Otherwise you may get sidetracked as you implement changes indefinitely. When you don’t own the vision, it is difficult to engage your team and lead them successfully. Engaging your team gives you the dynamic to create digital transformation successes!

6. Whether your title has “digital transformation” in it or not, most change and transformation projects in organizations today are related to digital transformation.

    That is because digital transformation is not about the technology itself but about improving the business so that it prospers in the digital age. The technology is used as support for making the transformation happen, but the deeper transformation is to be created and maintained by people. When the people experience / leadership aspect is neglected, the organization may get lost in implementing changes and turning in a circle but never evolving. It will be as such until the organization changes its approach or until it can’t survive anymore, and there happens a type of business cannibalization.

Attending the PMI Global congress in San Diego?  You can schedule an individual session with me in the “Ask an Expert” sessions and meet me in the Solutions Center (exhibit hall). Book your session here!

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