The below is a simple but extensive (though non-exhaustive and growing) list of factors to address and discover when working on organisational and digital transformations.
I’ve used this list as a helpful reminder when carrying out discovery sessions with clients, and you can too! If you’d like to suggest additions or changes, please let me know!
Organisation
- Line of business
- Risk register / immediate risks
- Risk appetite
- Public / private / shareholding / equity holding
- Impediments and current challenge
- Tracking up or tracking down
- Industry volatility and disruption
- Competitors
- Urgency
- Cost of delays
- Cost of changes
- Regulatory compliance needs
- Locations
- Time zones
- Organisation size
- Organisation age
- Diversity of business lines/units
- Purpose and values
- Mission statement
- History and folklore
- Past mergers and acquisitions
- Organisation identity in the world
- Public or private
- Short term pressure / long term pressure
- Heterogeneity of leadership / board
- Finances – cash, P&L, share price, turnover, EBITDA
- Cost sensitivity
- Preference for opex vs capex
- Exit strategy
People
- Organisational culture
- Heterogeneity of culture across the organisation
- Leadership buy-in to transformation
- Key stakeholders
- Prior transformation attempts
- Psychological safety (org-wide / in-team)
- Customer expectations
- Customer base (business, consumer, public, other)
- Ease of customer feedback
- Diversity
- Equality, gender pay gap visibility
- National identity and culture
- Survival anxiety
- Team member churn rate / length of tenure
- Organisational structure, reporting lines, matrix, hierarchies
- Geographical distribution
- Permanent teams vs outsourced teams
- Skill and mastery level
- Tacit knowledge in the organisation
- Capabilities and gaps
- Promotions, recognitions and awards
- Pay scales
- Orthodoxies
- Defined roles
- Cross-teaming
- Training, coaching, mentoring, support
- Career paths
- Physical working environment
- Communities of Practice
- Remote vs on-prem (degrees of remoteness)
- Longevity of teams
- Centres of Excellence / Enablement
- Stream aligned teams / function-aligned teams / hybrid
- Known rituals
- Facilities, office design, open vs closed offices, physical space
- Exposure to “business” information such as cashflow, profit, turnover, and granularity.
Process
- Operating model
- Policies
- Standards
- Processes
- Regulation of process
- Standardisation appetite
- Finance process
- Budget cycle
- Business case requirement
- Hiring process
- Procurement process and duration
- Adherence to frameworks
- International & national standards
- Audit frequency and type
- Governance, risk, compliance processes
- Product vs project
- ITIL / COBIT / other frameworks
- Environment provisioning
- Preference for waterfall vs agile
- Handoffs
- WIP limits
- Communications cadences and expectations
- Current methodologies and practices
- Security clearances
- Natural / habitual cadences
- Agile adoption
- Scrum adoption
- Methodologies at scale (SAFe, LESS, etc)
- Statistical Process Control – level of automation and adoption
Data and Tools
- Wall space or digital tools – information radiators
- Data-driven insights capability
- Communication tools – asynchronous vs synchronous
- Silos of information
- Data feedback loops
- Dataviz and analytic tools
- Degree of tool integration
- SSO
- “Shadow” IT
- Degree of autonomy / lockdown of machines
- AI/ML
- Volume of data
- Information availability, default to open/closed
- Data treated as asset or liability
- Default information openness
- Dashboarding and reporting
Products
- Number and characteristics of key products
- Criticality (life/death or just for fun)
- Cost of delay for features
- Level of planning expectation
- Estimates and deadlines required
- Risk appetite
- Reliability requirements
- Scaling requirements
- Quality requirements
- Degree of coupling
- Degree of cohesion
- Current lead time
- Current flow / wait time
- Current quality
- Internal regulation
- Unplanned vs planned work
- Product lifespan
- Feature lifespan
- Marketing approach and capabilities
Technology
- Satisfaction of technical capability
- Common platform?
- Architecture – monolithic vs microservices / APIs
- Potential fracture planes
- Team topology
- Corporate network (MPLS, VPNs, hybrid, SDN, etc)
- Cloud usage (production) – private/hybrid/public
- Edge and IoT technology
- Preferred technologies and codebase
- Build and Deployment pipelines
- Deployment strategies – canary, blue/green, rolling, A/B
- Engineering skills
- Engineering practices
- Service Desk?
- Infra as code
- Containerisation
- Test and QA approach
- Work definition approach – user stories, MoSCoW etc
- Rate, predictability and volume of work requests
- Where does work come from?
- Environments
- Monitoring and observability
- Degree of automation
- Branching strategies
- Existing reliability
- Existing rate of change
- Accelerate metrics
- Technical debt
- Pair programming, mob programming practices
- Ratio of junior to senior engineers
- Dev workstations and tooling
- Dev / Ops teams & handovers
- On-call culture and process
- Infosec team / function and interactions
Please feel free to use this however you’d like, and if you think something needs adding to this list of organisational transformation factors, please let me know!