About The Playbook
Korio is a group of professionals who came together to help companies re-platform and become agile and fast. We prefer to work with established companies in the mid-market who might be struggling with the transformation to digital. Collectively, we have gone through dozens of transformations. We have witnessed successes and failures.
Based on what we have learned, we have become quite opinionated on what works and what doesn't. This short post is part of a larger Playbook that we have assembled based on what we have learned.
For tactics that should guide how you think about your digital platform, explore the links below.
As we learn more from our clients and if we think that the learning is: A) actionable, B) validated and C) doesn't state the obvious, then we will add it to our Playbook.
Remember, everything we propose can be done incrementally and with very little lead-time. If you want to adopt the plays in a more gradual manner, go ahead but consider setting each up as an experiment: have a hypothesis, measure the impact and act on what you learn.
The Play: The Importance of Being Incremental
The problem with most digital transformations, in our view, is that they are designed as "big bang", one-shot replacement efforts. This approach has proven nearly impossible to get right. Despite what most consultants will tell you - and despite months of carerful planning - it is just too hard to know what is going to work. The good news is that transforming incrementally is possible.
With the right technology and methodology, moving in small, purposeful increments becomes a possibility. While most consultants will struggle to work and make money with an incremental approach, this is about you and the success of your business. Incremental is the way to go.
How
- Commit to true Agile practices. All good engineers will tell you that Agile, done right, works and that traditional waterfall approaches are badly broken.
- If you are going to create some sort of "hybrid" Agile approach, be very, very cautious. Make sure you aren't doing it because you are uncomfortable with the kinds of committments that Agile represents.
- Indoctrinate ALL of your employees in Agile. Pick an experienced Agile coach or champion who truly understands the benefits. Be sure to pair them up with an Engineer who is also experienced in Agile so that they can remind all stakeholders, again and again, why Agile is imperitive when it comes to building digital capabilities.
- Leverage Microservices or, at least, a modular architecture. We always suggest designing your services/features to be small and "de-coupled". This requires a small up-front investment in planning out an architecture but it is well worth it. A platform that isn't built in a modular fashion will be an unmanageable nightmare in 3 to 5 years.
- Over-invest in metrics and data. Embed them into each module you build. Use them for fact-based optimization of your modules and to repel uninformed opinion and speculation.
- Using performance metrics as your guide, optimize and release modules on very short cycles. Leading digital organizations call this "releasing early and often". It takes courage. Get good at it.
- If you are stuck trying to retire a legacy system, and if this is hampering efforts to do things small and fast, consider the incremental approach known as "Legacy Strangulation" to get you out from under the burden.
Why Bother
- If your industry is threatened by digitally savvy new entrants or large incumbents with deep enough pockets to invest in their digital platforms, they will be successful because they can do things small, fast and with ongoing optimization in mind.
What To Avoid
- Not truly understanding - across the enterprise - how much more effective it is to do things in small increments with data (versus opinion) and Agile methods.
- Conceding to the unnecessary modification of Agile practices. We recommend frameworks like Scaled Agile, if pure Agile makes you uncomfortable.
- Getting leadership to truly understand the benefits of incremental development, data-driven optimization and Agile are likely your biggest barriers to success in going digital. We have been conditioned to think that a sprawling committee of senior folks can invent digital experiences that work. This is not going to work. Be Agile. Go small. Leverage data. Celebrate each success.
The Fallback
It is often the case that you can't release your platform to the public in small increments. This often happens when you need all of your modules to launch at once. In these situations, stick to a modular approach and test public facing features with online testing panels and backoffice features in a "model office" environment. Online testing panels are pletiful and can turn around your tests in an hour. A Model Office is an actual physical space that will host a few systems and, on a regular basis during incremental development, staff members will rotate through simulations of the new platform in action.