Five priorities for your digital & automation agenda post-COVID-19

As we slowly emerge out of our lockdown cocoon, there’s a lot of commentary about what life in New Zealand will be like now and what our “new normal” will be.
Certainly, things are going to be tough economically, with a recession that some are forecasting to be worse than the GFC. We can expect international borders to remain closed or partially closed for the foreseeable future as many countries struggle to get COVID-19 under control and for many organisations that means finding new distribution strategies. It’s likely that a substantial percentage of the workforce will continue to work from home and (on the plus side) many organisations are reporting a large lift in digital usage.

I’ve always been a big fan of the idea that what’s made you successful so far isn’t necessarily what’s going to make you successful going forward. So now is the perfect time to review your digital and automation plans and make sure they are what your organisation needs for life post COVID-19.
 
So, here’s five ideas to get you started…
 
1. Take a stocktake of the digital, automation and innovation activities going on in your organisation at the moment. Something that seemed super important pre-lockdown might really not be that important any more. Try to capture everything, even the secret-squirrel, under the radar projects. Get them all on one list and leave no stone unturned. There will be some very obvious projects that you should stop now. Once you have that list, it can be a good exercise to categorise it into impact area – a good way to approach this might be:

1. Things you have to do (a contractual or regulatory obligation)
2. Things that will address a major pain point for customers
3. Things that will help save costs/grow revenue and help to protect your company’s financial viability
4. Things that were difficult to do remotely during lockdown that caused a big problem.

Any project that doesn’t fall into one of these categories can be paused or stopped completely now.

2. Set some immediate priorities. Three or four priorities at the most, things that will quickly make a difference to your organisation in the post COVID world. And things that you can do now – that you have the resources, the technical capability and the investment for (or you know you can find it). Having some immediate agreed priorities means you can be confident your teams are working on the best possible activities now while you figure out where to go from here.

3. Get a handle on how your customer behaviour and needs have changed as a result of the lockdown. See here for more detail about how to go about this. Feed these results back into your immediate priorities list. Those in-store digital tools you were building might be a lot less important now if everyone has moved to digital.  

4. Can you do more for less? Your CFO should always be a CDO’s best friend (!) but now’s an opportunity for you to be a friend back to them and find some ways to take cost out of your digital programme. Can you do something in-house that you would normally pay a vendor for? Can you make your MVP (minimum viable product) even more minimum without impacting the benefits?  Can you defer some spend to next financial year? Do you understand exactly what every team member is doing and can you re-point them to different areas to add value? Now is the time to really go over your spend with a fine tooth comb and see if there are opportunities to reduce your budget.
 
5. If some of your immediate priorities are already underway then now is the right time to review how those projects are tracking. It’s best to approach it on a “track me, don’t trust me” basis – meaning your teams need to prove they are on track with evidence, rather than providing verbal reassurances. Evidence-based project tracking is a great way to pick up gaps and issues that the team itself might not have realised they have. Key questions to ask are:

• Do you have the right resources for the project (people, budget, leadership commitment)? And how do you know?
• Is scope clear, has the work been broken down into manageable chunks and does everyone understand what needs to be delivered when? And how do you know? (Scope and deliverables may need to change based on your new priorities or new customer behaviour post lockdown).
• Is the project tracking to where it said it would be for the chunk it is working on now? (And how do you know?)

 
Now is the time to look carefully at whether a project is going off track and take action to address.
And don’t forget for every step you undertake revisiting your digital and automation priorities make sure you communicate and ask for input from your teams.

If we can help in anyway then please reach out.