By Rock E. Griffin, Consulting/Engagement Director, CGI, SAPinsider Expert | April 2020
In the early years of the space race, everyone was energized to break the mold, experimenting with new ideas and approaches to rocket and guidance design. There was little red tape or bureaucracy, just the urgency to succeed.
I spent seven years at Kennedy Space Center. The older engineers told me stories of how they would have an idea, go out to the warehouse or scrap yard to find what was needed, and hook it up to see if it worked. Many times it didn’t and we lost a lot of test rockets. But each rapid step got us all closer to a man on the moon!
Eventually, bloated programs, paired with endless politics and bureaucracy, drove the sector towards privatization. This opened the door to new ideas, approaches, and a quicker, cost efficient, and – dare I say “
transformative” – approach to space travel.
We can track this same trajectory with IT projects. They are often too cumbersome and take too long. They can be too expensive and offer little return on investment (ROI) to show for the effort. Not all IT projects are suited for true sea change outcomes. Transformative technologies, like HANA, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, virtual reality, and others call for very different project management frameworks and cultures as well as different styles of project managers and team members.
Wasn’t agile supposed to solve this problem? Well, agile is nice, but very few companies are truly agile. They are hybrids, still wed to internal processes that have taken decades to erect and which won’t go away quietly. A Fortune 100 manufacturing firm I worked with adopted agile methods. The project management office processes surrounding this looked very much like those of the old waterfall projects. They were not iterative, had enormous project management reporting, and were required to include dozens and dozens of internal organizations and hundreds of people to get work products approved. That’s not very agile!
In today’s world, the winner is often the one who is the swiftest to meet ROI targets. Quality and safety are still important concerns, but being first to market and then making consistent improvement is seen as key to success. It is proven to build excitement both internally and externally. In the last 20 years, we have seen the death of VHS tapes and Blockbuster stores, the move to DVDs and then, very quickly, the transition to streaming and downloading. The key to such a swift transition is to create the new framework in which the product or service is delivered. In the SAP world, SAP HANA was a skunkworks type of project. When released, the competitors dismissed it. But look what happened!
This kind of transformation starts in small teams, labs, and skunkworks, not in traditional IT shops. It requires new thinking, not conforming to the thousands of rules, red tape, and deliverables in the project management body of knowledge (PMBOK). Small teams can quickly craft prototypes and avoid the bottleneck that comes with mobilizing the traditional army of business and IT stakeholders.
Transforming Business with SAP Technology
A few years ago, I led a team working to install some SAP cloud transformational software for a fairly large firm. It involved integrating SAP HANA with some software products that had never been put together before to make a major leap forward in their business. Instantly, we were at odds with the users and IT teams. These parties wanted the new system to do everything the existing ones did and even display the same way. No transformation is possible when change is hindered by the complacency of normal. Looking back, we should have sought out a few rebels who wanted big change and built the prototype system out of sight from the rest of the user and IT community. Then, we could have demonstrated the new solution to executive management and pushed for implementation. This would have been hugely disruptive to line organizations, exactly what transformation needs to do!
Transformation requires quick escalation from idea to fielding the solution. It should involve different ways of integrating and significant changes to people’s jobs. It may involve some false starts and missed steps along the way, which executives should both expect and encourage to maintain a sense of urgency to deliver in weeks or months, as opposed to years. Transformation yields big changes to the culture of a business.
The biggest change is in people (the kinds of people you involve, their numbers, and roles), especially the transformation team. The new hot players in transformation do not look like they were pressed out of a mold to fit a corporate image. It is not what is on the outside nor the pedigree of the college you should look at. You need to look to those with drive, creativity, and passion; outsiders whose approaches challenge the status quo. Those who are more interested in chasing new ways of doing things than following old modes, even if it means making the establishment cringe. They look at problems and solutions in various divergent ways – which is what transformation requires.
Recruit Divergent Thinkers
Years ago, I turned over a team of engineers and specialists to my replacement several years ago. He told me he'd wondered why I'd kept a certain engineer on the team, as he clashed with several of the others. Eventually, though, he figured it out. About 20% of the time, the engineer had a unique way of looking at and solving a problem that others on the team didn’t possess and his way was the right one. You need these divergent people now more now than ever.
Each company will recruit transformative and divergent thinkers differently, and these prospects may come from different schools, backgrounds, and work histories than the ones your human resources team and resume scanners normally target. Divergent thinkers may have different and distinct work habits and the style of leading and directing them needs to be different. Divergent thinkers will not stay if you put them in many hours of meetings every day. Project and line managers need to relearn how to manage their efforts and how to provide leadership, mentoring, and coordination to transformation teams so that they thrive. The rebels on the team will break some eggs and create their own culture and rules. Up to a point, this is what you want. Allow them to create their own team structure while management empowers, challenges, encourages, and develops them.
Project managers (PM) and managers need to harness the power of relationships and involvement more than ever before. Each member of a team is a unique individual and expects to be treated as such. Learning what each person wants and needs, meeting needs that often challenge the company’s norms, and directing and encouraging employees toward their individual goals is required, as well as increased education around how to manage employees born in and after 1990.
When to Involve Vendors and IT Departments
When to involve vendors and IT departments varies from project to project but at some point you MUST involve your key vendors and IT architects. Two brief examples explain why:
- A very large insurer had a well-financed skunkworks in progress. Their ideas were cutting edge, but they would be one-offs and expensive to maintain. By connecting them to the SAP sales team they were able to discuss their objectives and architecture with the SAP industry transformation experts. They discovered SAP already was rolling out a standard product to accomplish several of their most expensive challenges. Co-innovation proved a faster and lower cost time to market.
- A well-known company was trying to implement 10 transformation projects simultaneously. The problem was, they had not involved the IT architects who would have to integrate these breakthrough solutions into the rest of the enterprise. Once the architects were consulted, it was apparent that integration was not simple and some solutions had to be integrated one by one, not big bang. This caused the complete transformation to be over a year late and substantially over budget. Had IT been included earlier – at the prototype stage – they would have discovered the integration challenges earlier before implementation contracts were let.
Finally, transformation requires rapid and dramatic change – in roles, processes, technology, and end-user experience. Most current change management processes are like their IT counterparts – slow, cumbersome, and assume only incremental change, not a revolution. I have seen change management plans that are longer and more expensive than the technology projects they support!
What This Means for the SAPinsider Community
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete," said R. Buckminster Fuller, a famous American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. The purpose of transformation is not to conduct business exactly like it is done now. The cloud, robotics, Big Data like HANA, AI, IoT, and so much more exist to totally disrupt your market and change your business. Don’t let the outgoing waves keep you from success. This is your chance to create the new and make the old obsolete!
So, how do you proceed to generate true transformation in your organization?
- Foster a culture that allows all ideas and points of view. Bring together divergent idea people and facilitate some design thinking sessions.
- Build your skunkworks and idea incubator once your culture has been established (the latest trend is to refer to this as the "garage"). Pick off small teams with the latest talent and an innovative bent of mind. Keep the traditionalist nay sayers away! Give your small teams a BIG challenge and a PM/facilitator experienced in transformation projects. Let them hang together, spend a week or two trying different ideas and alternatives. If none work out, try again. Great inventors learn from their mistakes.
- Involve your key vendors (like SAP) early. Visit their transformation centers to understand where they are going and how best to leverage their products and services. Their centers can help you with design thinking, ideas, prototypes, and much more.
- Once out of the skunkworks idea shop, add just enough structure to the team to estimate, prototype, and realize something real. Don’t worry about all the things that will prevent success. Focus on realizing the dream—the details can come later.
- Involve enough of the corporate team members to add the needed talent to work out integration, organization, logistics, personnel, and other critical success factors. Watch out for the people who only find reasons it won’t work. Someone who always plays devil’s advocate needs to be exited from the organization.
- While working on the transformative solution, make sure some people on the side are working up the true costs to implement and the ROI. Just because it is cool doesn’t mean it is worth doing.
- Pitch to the highest level of management you can. Folks who really want the transformation, not the executives trying to maintain status quo and their empires.
