Do you have a chicken when you need a pig?

Welcome back to our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series.

We’re continuing to explore the theme of Digital’s Blowing Up Operations (here’s last weeks’ ideas to get started with in case you missed it).

This week I want to talk about embedding an Operations Lead in your transformation team and how to make sure you have the right person for the job.

Small reminder as we get underway - “Operations” could equally mean Contact Centre, Customer Support etc. It’s those teams who provide day to day support for your customers who are most likely to get the fallout from a poorly planned transformation release.

When we talk to digital transformation leaders, we often hear three types of feedback:

1. “We included Operations stakeholders all the way through the development process, but when we launched, they weren’t prepared”
2. “Ops knew our forecast was just a guesstimate, how did we know the change would be so popular?”
3. “Ops keep requesting changes that are pushing back our go-live dates – it would have been good to get this feedback sooner”.

​I bet that all these transformation projects included an Operations representative in their project team and in all likelihood, they’ve done their job diligently.

​So, what’s going wrong? 

It could be a will/skill problem but often the underlying issue is lack of clarity of expectations around what the Ops Lead is there to do.
 
Here’s three questions to make sure you have the right Operations Lead in your transformation team:

One: Do they understand how we work?

​As a minimum, your Ops Lead needs a solid understanding of agile and the other methodologies that you are using in your project (for example human-centred design, lean agile).

​Check out my post Agile angst – overcoming project governance woes for some pointers on getting your team and your stakeholders up to speed with how you work.

Two: Are they a chicken or a pig?

Everyone knows this analogy (referencing stakeholder involvement for the feature release of bacon and eggs) – the chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

Your Ops lead needs to be a pig – fully integrated in the project and fully committed to its success.

It’s helpful to clarify upfront the extent of what that commitment involves.
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Does your Ops Lead know that you expect them to keep the Head of Operations informed about how the project is progressing? Do they know that they need to actively participate in the discovery process so that Ops-critical capabilities are included in scope? Are they taking responsibility to make sure everyone in Ops is well prepared for your release date?

I’d recommend using a role clarity document (here's my version you can try) – which is a bit like a job description but for people who work with your team rather than for your team.
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I’m also an enormous fan of the RACI (or RASCI) approach of getting everyone’s roles and responsibilities out on the table and agreed. It can be a big time commitment to get this sorted (two to three days) but for a large complex project it’s a great upfront investment in clarity.

Three: Can they transform themselves?

The answer to this question really depends on the type of work your project is doing. If you are fully digitising a customer process that is currently manually fulfilled you may only need an Ops Lead to act as a subject matter expert. But if you are digitising a process that your Ops team will still be involved with post-launch then you will need someone who can think beyond the way things are done now.

And it’s really hard when you’re in the thick of it, to see the opportunities for digitisation.

​If your Ops Lead doesn’t have a track record of being able to significantly improve processes then providing them a buddy who can act as a fresh set of eyes (and ask the “why” questions) is a good idea.

So, now you've got an excellent Ops Lead in place and you've answered the three big strategic questions, it's time to start  looking at how you manage phasing your work. More on that next week.

​See you then!

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