Digital transformation tips 2 – Leveraging the Cloud for Digital Transformation
Tip #5 – Encourage risk-taking
In other words, fail fast. There are only so many times you can fail to deliver results. But if failing only takes one week and you have a month to deliver results, that affords us the luxury of failing three times before we get it right the fourth time. Therefore, in the first couple of attempts, you can attempt to shoot further and achieve more. Ideally, you don’t have to completely throw out the work performed in the first few attempts, and hopefully, you can reuse what was created in the first phases. But at the very least, you will be able to use the lessons learned from those mistakes.It’s better to disrupt yourself than to have someone do it for you.
Tip #6 – On-way door Vs. Two-way door decision
One way of defining risk strategy is to understand if your decision to invest in digital transformation for a project or department is a one-way door or two-way door decision. Try to have more two-way door decisions where you can retract if things go wrong and have fewer one-day door decisions where you have to move forward once started, and there is no looking back. You can be more agile and fast in two-way door decisions where you define existing strategy and timeline; however, you need to be extra careful and analyze more data for one-way door decisions. For example, in a two-way door decision example, you can move your HR payroll application to migrate to the cloud and keep an exit strategy to purchase SaaS solutions like Workday or ADP if migration isn’t complete in two months or after certain budgets. However, if you decide to move your e-commerce application to the cloud, it will impact your end-user experience. Hence, you need to carefully analyze data as it will be a one-way door decision, and there is no going back without a significant impact.
Tip #7 – Clear delineation of roles and responsibilities
Fully delineate roles and responsibilities. Make sure that all team members are aligned on their responsibilities and check that there are no gaps in your team. Ideally, you will have a good mix of people with vast experience in cloud migration, digital transformation, and process optimization. Couple that with engineers and analysts that are not billing at an expert rate but can execute the plan laid out by these expert resources.Current technology in general and AWS, in particular, is changing at an ever-increasing pace. For that reason, attracting talent with the right skills is an essential yet difficult step to achieve in digital transformations.Some of the positions that will most likely need to be filled in your journey are as follows:
- Software engineers
- Infrastructure architects
- Cloud computing specialists
- Data analysts and data scientists
- Solution architects
- Security specialists
- Project managers
- Quality assurance testers
- DevOps administrators
- UX designers
- Trainers and documentation specialists
- Business analysts
Above is a partial list, and your project may require more or fewer people to fill these roles. Perhaps not all roles will be required. And in your case, you may need additional roles to those included in this list.This section taught us best practices and what to do in your cloud migration project. In the next section, you will learn about what you should not do and how to avoid making mistakes.
