A single source of truth makes all the difference when it comes to delivery of large-scale change or digital transformations. How do you know at any one time where you are at on your transformation journey? Can you ensure that the pace at which you’re completing change is not holding you back? What strategic insight can you take from your current transformation?
We explore the benefits of considering consistent programme and project management tooling across your organisation to unlock opportunities, reduce risk, encourage collaboration and improve visibility. We also explore the steps required to reach this level of organisational consistency.
Benefits Of Uniform Tooling.
Uniform tooling across an organisation has multiple benefits from a delivery and operational level. We highlight five of the benefits that uniform tooling could have on your organisation:
Programme Oversight
- Consistent use of tooling allows visibility of projects from enterprise and portfolio level to team level, allowing for better planning, reactivity and improvement during a programme of change.
- Improved insight can be gathered from accurate data, enabling more informed and early decision making.
- Reduced risk of data compromise, with the removal of manual aggregation which can take place when using multiple tools across different teams or workstreams.
- Reduces the need to transpose information between tooling to gather an overarching view and therefore the risk of introducing inconsistencies.
Reducing Friction
- If all the staff within your organisation are speaking the same language and taking the same steps when recording their progress against transformation goals, working collaboratively becomes easier.
- Visibility on dependencies across the board allow for simpler planning and more effective communication.
- No manual aggregation is required for teams to interact effectively with each other enabling the seamless data flow across (and up and down) the organisation.
- Innovative and creative problem solving can be revealed by removing barriers for experimentation.
Effect on Your People
- Drives a culture of unity and best practice adoption, reducing the need to seek alternative or bespoke solutions outside the tooling requirements.
- Teams understand how they contribute to the higher-level plan, increasing the engagement and improving the quality of information which is visible at all levels.
- Fluid-skilled team members require less context-switching increasing satisfaction and removing frustration.
- Increase internal mobility leading to greater retention when it comes to development opportunities.
- Leveraging a consistent approach removes unnecessary roadblocks when it comes to delivery and adoption.
Cost Efficiency
- With a reduction in the range of licences there could be a cost saving benefit to standardised tooling.
- A higher number of a single type of licence has the potential for a discounted rate per licence due to the bulk-purchase.
- Choosing a unified tooling approach also has implications on training costs and administrative requirements.
- Drives improvements in unnecessary processing and analytical activities which in turn can reduce decision making time.
Data Inefficiency
- Data silos can appear where systems are unable to communicate effectively, a unified approach can lead to less wasted resources or blocked projects.
- Eradication of manual bottlenecks due to translation between silos.
- Tool sprawl can often lead to irregularities and even security vulnerabilities, a single, or more consistent pool of tooling can reduce this vulnerability.
Now you are aware of some of the benefits that this can have for your organisation, what are the steps required to reach this level of uniform harmony.
Assessing Today
As with any transformation, we advise you take time to complete a transformation assessment as an early step. This explores the current situation, in this case:
- Who is using project management tools already?
- How are the current tool or tools governed within your organisation?
- Who takes ownership of your tooling at an enterprise level?
- How are your change programmes or projects using the tools and what insights are they currently using?
It is unlikely that no tools are being used in an organisation considering embarking on large-scale change. Assessing the current state of play within your organisation is the first step to consistent tooling.
While a spreadsheet system with manual aggregation has served some organisations well for years, the time for tooling is here. A modern enterprise organisation cannot expect to remain on top of its competitors without implementation of a robust and future-proof tooling system to guide it.
Setting up for the Future
The next part of the assessment will involve setting out your key objective for any tool and defining the requirements scope. We’ll pose questions like:
- What do you need the tooling to deliver?
- What are the key metrics that you’ll be reporting on?
- How detailed and how high-level do you need reporting?
These will all be factors which affect the identification and selection of the project management tool that will be most beneficial to you. With these answers we’ll draw up a set of criteria that will enable you to create options, based on your key objectives.
There are numerous transformation and project management tools on the market, and they each have unique benefits that suit organisations requirements. We’ve worked with a variety of different solutions when partnering with organisations, and they all play a part in growing an organisations transformation capability. The difference is made with the implementation, the transformation and the road mapping prior to selecting a tool.
The Tool Doesn’t Matter
Now that you have your requirements and you have options before you, selecting the perfect tool is not going to solve any issues overnight and seamlessly transformation your organisation into a robust and future-proof transformation machine.
Implementation of tooling about more than the tool itself. Starting with the structures, the people and the process, everything must be considered holistically to ensure the tooling is effective.
If some departments are working well utilising direction from one tool and the reporting functionality meets your needs, they may be resistant to redeploying onto a new tool. This is where business readiness consultants, such as those available in our Growth Practice, can work with teams to ensure that any change that affects them is managed.
Conclusion
While spreadsheets and variable tool adoption have served organisations well in the past, the time for manual aggregation and complex digital landscapes is in the past. Organisations that refuse to develop and adopt consistent tooling across will eventually be out-paced and out-manoeuvred by lean and agile organisations that can take ownership of projects at both a granular and executive level.
The considerable task of widespread consistency may seem daunting, but we have worked effectively to find solutions for organisations in the past.
Reach out to one of our consultants to learn more about the opportunity that standardised tooling can unlock in your transformation.
Author: Dom Harman, Principal Consultant, Delivery Practice
