Is your Organization marching in the direction of your Transformation effort? Here’s a quick way to check it out.
Detecting the (lack of) alignment
A Transformation strategy is intended to create value via important changes in the way people, process and technology behave and interact. However, the creation of additional value is only possible when all the elements are aligned to a common vision.
A not-aligned organization is like a football team with each team member playing his own game: one is playing ‘catenaccio’, another one believes in total football, while some others are playing tiki taka or longballs. Everyone wants to win, but the team is not playing a coherent game, much less they play your own strategy.
So, you want your organization aligned with your trasformation agenda.
But how do you know when the organization is not aligned? There is a very simple litmus test: just ask your employees to describe the transformation strategy of the organization. They don’t know? They answer “selling more”? They have no idea? They say it’s a matter for the CEO only? It is amazing how each manager, not to say each employee, could have a different understanding about the transformation strategy they are supposed to execute.

So what?
Asking employees about the transformation strategy is a very basic test. If your employees do not understand the transformation strategy, they will not execute it, so the very first step is to get them aligned, being sure that they understand their role, the impact of their actions on the bottom line, the requested change in actions, process, and mindset. After that, you must be well aware that the success of your Transformation is a function of three components:
Transformation results = f(sharing, measuring, managing the strategy)
Alignment is the first parameter of the function. To ensure success for your transformation you should have in place all the three parameters, and you should set, refine, and update them right.
Your transformaton journey is not a one shot game, rather it’s a continous ongoing process. Thus, you shoud have in place the right structure, culture and technology and the right build-measure-learn feedback loops to continously adjust to the ever changing reality of the markets.

Marcello Del Bono is coaching and leading Agile Teams, and consulting organizations on Agile Transformation. He has multi-year experience as a Product Owner, Scrum Master and Agile Coach in e-commerce, IT, Marketing and Decision Support Systems in Media, Telco, Finance, Fashion industries.
Contact him on LinkedIn.