There are many factors that influence decision-making about which digital projects you should work on. Here's how you should face them.
As the pandemic has demonstrated, companies desperately need to modernize their processes and adopt digital tools to overcome current challenges and respond to constantly changing demands. But when faced with this need, they can quickly become overwhelmed by the task at hand. How can they face such a profound transformation that encompasses so many projects? How can they start this journey – and quickly?
As you can imagine, this is far from easy. But it becomes easier if you have an in-depth strategy for this. Planning for digital acceleration lays the foundation for success and ensures the adoption of valuable solutions that move your business forward.
There are many crucial aspects to this strategy, but today I want to focus on the initial phase of the process, a part so essential that it can make or break the entire journey. This initial phase consists of choosing the right digital projects to work on.
The difficulty in choosing the right projects
Choosing digital projects to develop in your company may not seem like the most difficult thing to do at first glance. How could this be? If your company is digitally lagging behind, there are many paths you can take. If you are already on the path to digital transformation, then you already have a direction to go. But that's exactly it: how can you be sure that the projects you end up doing are exactly what you need now?
If you still have a lot of work to do, you may be under the impression that every project is a winner, as any digital project that brings new technology to your company is better than no technology at all. If you're already digitally transforming, you might think there are logical steps in the process that will reveal themselves as you go.
Both are not true.
On the one hand, there are digital projects that won't be winners for you. They may be too complicated to integrate, too expensive to develop, too slow to generate ROI, or simply too wrong for your most pressing needs. On the other hand, a digital transformation process has no recipe for success. You may develop and integrate certain digital solutions to a point where you realize that the planned roadmap needs adjustments regarding the next steps to be taken.
This is possible because digital acceleration implies 2 different but simultaneous processes. On the one hand, there is a rapid transformation of business operations to meet new demands as quickly as possible. On the other hand, there is the traditional digital transformation of central infrastructure, which has a slower pace. The first is possible by implementing readily available solutions (especially cloud-based), while the second is about developing your own digital tools to boost your infrastructure.
Thus, digital acceleration covers the entire spectrum of needs (both urgent and long-term) that your business may have. And it does this by providing the agility necessary to quickly move from one project to another, all carefully selected to provide more immediate results. Naturally, the “secret” of this selection lies in the underlying approach, which follows a 4-step process to define which is the best digital project to tackle next.
Let's see this process in detail.
The 4 steps to digital acceleration success
While a digital acceleration process always starts with a clear roadmap in mind, it is flexible enough to accommodate new needs and follow new paths as the process progresses. Both the initial roadmap and the changes that will follow are defined through the following 4 steps, which allow you to better identify the digital projects that make the most sense for your business at any given moment.
These steps include:
1. In-depth assessment of available opportunities. The first thing you should do is make a list of all the digital projects you can undertake. Initially, you just need to write them down, but then organize them in order of ROI or potential value. After that, you need to add new factors to the mix, including the necessary resources (equipment, talent, money, time).
2. Analyze your firepower. The initial assessment will certainly be incomplete, as the priorities defined there will lack a critical component: their ability to face each of these projects. That's why you need to look inside your company to see if you have the know-how, tools, data and talent available to work on these projects. Knowing this will help you identify which projects you could work on with what you have and which ones will require more investment in terms of resources.
3. Redefine priorities according to relevance. The above analysis can give you a list of viable and valuable projects, but that doesn't mean you should work on them right away. Before you do this, you will have to think about whether the projects at the top of the list make sense in terms of relevance.
For example, you may find that integrating automated customer support solutions comes second to adopting a CRM in terms of ROI. If you have the resources, you might be tempted to use CRM first, but perhaps your customers are complaining about your customer service right now, which means it's more relevant to work on automated solutions first.
Basically, this step aims to identify the solutions that are most relevant to your most pressing pain points.
4. Develop, measure and start again. Now that you've conducted data-driven analysis for all the projects you could take on, it's time to develop ones that you can work on and complete faster and that will deliver substantial ROI.
Once you develop and integrate them, the work is not over. You will need to evaluate whether the assumptions you made to choose these projects were correct. Did you complete development on schedule? Did the solution provide the expected results? Were there unforeseen challenges throughout development? Measuring all of this will allow you to adjust the development process and better identify the next projects you should undertake.
As you can see, identifying the right projects for your company entails a data-driven approach that prioritizes your opportunities for improvement based on criteria relevant to your current situation. Naturally, this is easier said than done. You'll likely have to make difficult choices when prioritizing projects, even with the data in hand. While there is no surefire way to help you when you reach this point, you should always trust your gut – without neglecting feedback from stakeholders and the team.
One more thing: You might think that a lack of specific resources to work on a specific project is strong evidence that you should include it on your priority list. But it really depends. For example, you may not have the in-house talent to work on a CRM implementation – perhaps CRM engineers or QA testing professionals. You may see this as a major obstacle, but the solution may be easier than you think (in this case, you could hire a QA Testing Services company to help you fill talent gaps).
There are many factors that influence decision-making about which digital projects you should work on. Don't rush your digital acceleration out of panic or fear. It's better to get it right and take confident steps forward than to move quickly only to develop digital glitches.
