Step #7 in digital transformation sucess is to adapt and innovate quickly. This is often taken to mean “adopt Agile development”, but that’s no use without speeding up management decision-making as well.
Think about the steps for adopting an innovation:
- Coming up with an idea,
- Making the plan to test or develop the idea,
- Getting approval and budget to start working on it,
- Doing the development or testing,
- Drawing conclusions from the results,
- Deciding to invest in the innovation,
- Rolling out the innovation.
Lean Startup and Agile are about how to speed up steps (1), (2), (4) and (5), the innovation development steps. Their objective is to maximise learning and progress in the shortest amount of time.
There are two gatekeeper steps, (3) and (6), where managers and budget holders decide if they want to commit resources to the innovation. If those steps are slow, for example because of annual budget cycles or lengthy budget approval procedures, then the total time to market for the innovation will still be slow.
The digital world moves quickly, so your organisation needs to move quickly as well. When you speed up innovation development, you should also speed up management approvals.
© 2020 Veridia Consulting
