The Crucial Role of Experience and Process Discovery in Transformation Efforts

Often, a transformation effort’s success or failure isn’t clear until too late in the journey. All too frequently, a transformation is nearing implementation — or has even been completed — before it becomes obvious that the effort will miss the goals and objectives outlined at the start. Even in cases of “successful” implementations, organizations regularly find that while their efforts might look like a victory on the surface, they fall short of achieving the goals that originally prompted the initiative.

While ineffective implementation plans, poor execution and insufficient change management may all be key contributors, disappointing transformation outcomes are commonly traced back to the very beginning: to the discovery and planning efforts. By taking sufficient time to properly understand the customer and user expectations and their desired experiences, recognize the challenges and benefits of current processes and articulate a clearly defined vision; organizations hinder their ability to create programs that deliver real value. 

In an economic environment where executives are expected to do more with less, they are under increasing pressure to show results – and show them immediately – driving them to prioritize speed, sometimes truncating initial discovery and planning efforts. In fact, our recent study found that business leaders frequently impede their company’s digital transformation efforts. While organizations must deliver transformation efforts agilely and quickly to keep up with the competition, it’s critical that their efforts are thoughtfully planned and scoped – or they risk falling short of delivering on goals and objectives. 

Below, we outline common pitfalls organizations face when they fail to establish a solid current state understanding and define a vision for customer and user experiences. We also introduce an approach that brings rigor, smooths transitions and builds momentum to ensure organizations are maximizing the ROI and speed of their transformation journeys.

Common Transformation Pitfalls

In a marketplace where “agile,” “fail fast” and “test and learn” dominate the rhetoric of boardrooms and breakrooms alike, eagerness to begin development and implementation efforts often results in expedited vision development and road mapping. While this may accelerate the transformation timeline, it increases the risk of falling short of transformation goals and objectives.

Organizations that fail to complete thorough discovery and visioning efforts risk falling victim to one or more of four common pitfalls:

1. Focusing on Low-Value Areas or Infrequent Issues
   As transformation efforts begin, sentiment and anecdotes often dominate the narrative. This can provide valuable insights on operational and experience pain points for customers or employees, helping to focus efforts. But organizations run into issues when these narratives are taken as the primary input.
   By developing an empirical framework to evaluate and prioritize areas for focus, organizations can better understand potential impact and gain alignment and support all the way from frontline performers up to executive leadership. This helps prevent organizations from investing too much effort on solutions to minute problems while neglecting others that have wider-ranging impacts. It also helps to build awareness, move the organization along the change curve and ultimately drive adoption.
2. Misunderstanding the Experience Drivers
   Overconfidence, bias and institutional groupthink from key decision-makers can wreak havoc on transformation strategies if not backed by data and research. If leaders fail to gain real insights into the problems they seek to solve, this can lead them to basing their goals on erroneous assumptions. This often results in re-work or backtracking during the transformation journey as more information is learned – or worse, full implementation of solutions aimed at improper drivers.
   Defining experience drivers objectively, through targeted investigations and ethnographic research, helps them comprehend the current environment and define a future vision that delivers real value.
3. Solving for Symptoms – Not Root Causes
   Understanding the true root cause of issues and pain points is a difficult undertaking. The excitement of identifying solutions – especially ones that leverage innovative and emerging technologies – should not outweigh the crucial step of unearthing the “why” behind the challenges an organization faces. It’s essential to discover if the root cause of an issue is truly being impacted or a mere symptom is being addressed. Without doing the necessary due diligence, an organization risks creating an exciting new solution that fails to make a difference.
   While it should be recognized that symptoms may need to be addressed in the shorter term to improve experiences or provide operational lift, this should not become a substitute for long-term resolution.
4. Miscalculating the Potential Service & Operational Benefit
   Often, transformation capabilities and opportunities move into detailed design and development without fully understanding the potential impact on customer or employee experience and processes. Developing a sound understanding of the current state extends beyond defining aspirational success measures, such as OKRs and KPIs. It should include empirical evidence of customer pain points and journeys and quantify the operational and process effort.
   By developing a robust understanding of current processes and experiences – and the potential impact on them – teams can establish appropriate expectations for transformation efforts and success.

While the current market necessitates a need for speed, this shouldn’t be used as justification to rush through the transformation discovery and planning process. On the contrary, the current expectations placed on executives to do more with fewer resources – and to deliver results faster – should compel leaders to focus even more on the discovery and planning phase to ensure they can quickly and confidently move through the development and implementation efforts, expediting the achievement of their goals.  

An Approach to Human-Centered Discovery – at Speed

To initiate an effective transformation program, organizations should employ an approach that leverages two things: service design and value targeting. By doing so, they can develop meaningful current-state insights and future visions that overcome the above potential pitfalls and establish a solid understanding of the experience and processes. Service design is a methodology to re-imagine experiences and underlying operational processes through the lens of the customer or user. Value targeting is a process decomposition methodology that accelerates the identification of people, processes and technology opportunities through detailed analysis of work effort and activities.

By employing both service design and value targeting, executives can develop meaningful current-state insights and future visions that overcome the above potential pitfalls and establish a solid understanding of the experience and processes.

A human-centered approach to understanding the current state and move transformations from conception to the real world enables a continuous, repeatable model that ensures rigor, smooths transitions and builds momentum.

Human-Centered Discovery Approach

A human-centered approach to understanding the current state and move transformations from conception to the real world enables a continuous, repeatable model that ensures rigor, smooths transitions and builds momentum.

With this approach, you can create a thoughtfully defined plan that allows you and your team to move through the development and execution phases at speed, helping you to deliver results faster.

Conclusion

Gaining a solid grasp of experience and processes and defining a future vision is just part of a transformation effort – but none may be more critical. Once a transformation effort starts off course it may never be corrected – or worse it may not even be noticed until it is too late. Leveraging a structured approach to frame, assess, envision and define the desired experience and processes is one crucial way to help position your transformation journey for success.