The Situation
A leading chemical company found itself navigating a competitive landscape where other industry players were rapidly investing in digital transformation initiatives. To stay ahead, the company introduced a new leadership role within its organizational structure, specifically tasked with developing a comprehensive digitalization framework that would steer the business into the future.
Recognizing the importance of this transformation, the leadership team made a substantial financial commitment to invest in both digital technologies and the talent required to implement them. This investment was driven by the clear recognition that opportunities to digitize current manual processes were abundant, offering the potential for significant operational improvements.
To ensure that these digital initiatives were aligned with broader business objectives, the company undertook strategic evaluations of its systems and data architecture, ensuring that both business and IT goals were fully integrated. Furthermore, cross-functional communication improvements within the organization began to foster new ideas and drive meaningful conversations, propelling the company’s digital transformation efforts forward.
The Solution
Digital Roadmap
Our client’s digital roadmap involved a seven-month development cycle, as key findings and organizational expectations helped shaped the strategy while projects had already started.
Some features of the roadmap included the strategy, vision, project plans, resourcing commitments, financial plans, communication plans, project selection criterion, links to the organization’s overall strategy, systems architecture analyses, project submission processes, new project funnels, and a digital governance infrastructure.
Establishing Cultural Buy-in
Establishing a culture that thinks and behaves with a digital mindset takes time, diligence, discipline, and consistency. Getting the people in an organization to support digital strategy is only as difficult as it is to demonstrate the value that digital technology brings.
As part of our digital solution, we assessed our client’s current and desired level of readiness for adopting a digital culture. We helped their team breakthrough silos and adopt a project management framework and cadence that ultimately became the model for the rest of the organization.
The Projects
To demonstrate the value and drive cultural adoption, our client kickstarted with twelve initial projects to build momentum, established a robust communication plan, set a pace of agile project management, and regularly involved cross-functional teams on solution development.
Throughout the execution of these digital projects, our client has seen many benefits and significant increases in engagement when it comes to digitalization initiatives. Several team members have stepped up to either be the owner of new projects, or to take on a leadership role in continually improving new tools.
Tools, Platforms and Program
The Results
AMEND provided the capacity, thought leadership, and opportunities to get the digital strategy off the ground, using a series of quick-impact projects that helped the organization understand the value of digitalization. As an extension of our client's team, AMEND started integrating a digital mindset and framework by including every function of the company in its roadmap of projects.
