In addition to being our tagline, this is a great question that we help our customers answer.
Many journeys often go like this:
Enthusiasm
Disillusionment
Confusion
Search for the guilty
Punishment of the innocent
Praise for the non-participants
And the cycle repeats itself, often with little understanding of what went wrong in the first place. Oh, people might be replaced, but the fundamentals which caused the failure in the first place remain firmly in place. It is time to break the cycle.
We talk a lot about customer journeys and customer experience – it even has its own initials – CX. But a company has its own journey, and a company undergoing (or even just thinking about) a digital transformation needs to think about how that journey will start and where it will end, not to mention everything in between.
It is critical to understand that, despite promises and optimism, your journey is not going to be a yellow-brick road with rainbows and unicorns, and you shouldn’t expect such. However, it doesn’t have to be a death march either. There are a few key things to understand when starting on the journey:
Plan the journey. Lay out where you want to end up in 5 years, even if you are struggling just to understand what is possible in just the next 5 weeks. This is an exercise in architecture, strategy, finance, technology, and culture. This is where Cloudway comes in.
Revisit the plan every 2-3 months. Things change. Business changes. Markets change. Budgets change. People change. The plan isn’t set in stone. Assume that some of the underlying assumptions will change or no longer be valid, and revisit the plan to account for the changes.
Accept that not everyone will survive the journey, for a variety of reasons. You may have to make some tough decisions along the way. And, also accept that new employees with fresh perspectives may steer the journey in ways you hadn’t considered. That’s OK, be open-minded and make sure the roadmap accounts for new ideas.
Ask for help! Odds are that you and your company have never undertaken a journey of this magnitude. Journeys of any kind are best undertaken with company, not alone. At Cloudway we have helped many customers undertake and survive the journey, coming out stronger, more competitive and nimble.
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