The art of crystalising your value proposition BEFORE you transform

Have you considered where the Digital Transformation journey really starts? Does it start when you sign the purchase order for that all-encompassing new piece of software which has taken two years to get sign off for, because it is the most significant investment the company has made in a decade? Or did it start earlier when a lone employee started experimenting with a little-known app called Slack in their team? Or did it start when the CEO stood up at the annual kick off to talk through the company’s new digital-first strategy?

No. It starts (or should start) much earlier than that. The true beginning of transformation is much less profound. It starts with an exercise to fully define and understand your value proposition – ultimately, what is the value you offer to your end customer? Have you crystalised your value proposition? This doesn’t always mean the external customer either. If you work in the IT department for example, you may not serve the end-customer directly, but you still have customers; your “customers” are everyone within the organisation that uses your IT services. Have you ever stopped to consider the fundamental value you provide to these customers? Has the organisation stopped to think about what it wants from you?

This may sound like management/consultancy-speak, but what is transformation actually for? Why are you changing anything? Fundamentally, the goal of any change is to enhance the organisation’s core values and benefits, i.e. to do more of the good stuff. This starts by defining what that good stuff is, and setting your organisation’s KPIs around it. Then you can judge any future change against their contribution to those KPIs. If they don’t align with the KPIs, why make the change?

Too often we see organisations embarking on a change without defining their KPIs first. As a result, the change struggles to find traction because employees aren’t fully on board, because they don’t know why the change is happening in the first place. It also risks the change happening in the entirely wrong place or moving in the wrong direction. With clear KPIs from the outset, you can ensure your strategy and any changes and buying decisions made along the way are the right ones.