How Lean Managers Help in Digital Transformation

Probably 5 years ago, digital transformation was considered hype even in the manufacturing sector. Stylish, fashionable, youthful. Today, there is no choice: to go into it or not, because everyone understands perfectly well that if you don’t go, competitors will go so far that you won’t be able to catch up; with all the most unfortunate consequences for business.

Open sources say that more than 85% of large companies, especially in the industrial sector, are engaged in digital transformation. And this should be understood as a wide range of options: from “we tried a little, it didn't work out, we gave up” to “really impressive multi-year and multi-billion dollar programs.”

Different sources cite different figures for truly successful digital transformations, and it is impossible to adequately refer to them, the range is too large. In order to show the benchmark, I will take the most optimistic estimate that I was able to find. Only 19% of companies that carried out digital transformation achieved planned indicators or exceeded them. 19%, Karl! The rest, at best, lagged slightly behind the costs in effects.

I managed to observe, communicate, and study different approaches in different companies. Of course, there are a huge number of factors that influence this, but I am deeply convinced that even in the most outdated, most non-digital, most non-transformed companies, it is possible to implement digital with an acceptable level of return. On crutches, with pain, with creaking, with swearing, but it is possible. As long as one condition is met – that the top management shares and supports the value of digital. The only question is how many painful months this will result in. Some, alas, give up earlier.

What I saw. In quite a large number of companies, the management has a great desire to do this, but nothing comes of it. Well, nothing at all. They copy approaches, work format, roles in the project team – everything is the same. The focus from the TOPs is cosmic. Several months pass – and all in vain. Nothing comes of it. It didn't work out? Then it wasn't meant to be.

Someone joked: What is the absence of a result in Russian? – It is the absence of a result plus an interesting story.

The company is faced with a lack of results and each time hears some amazing (and even objective) story about why it didn’t work out.

You communicate with managers, with the team, experts, developers. Well, definitely not fools, but very competent specialists. And in the end, nothing.

The most frequently asked question from these companies is: “How did you manage to build a dialogue between business and IT?” “They don't talk to each other,” they tell us.

Of course, they are from different planets. On the one hand, there is a business that is technologically savvy and knows all the nuances of production, but does not understand why all these web services are needed, because it is already clear how to manufacture products. On the other hand, there are IT specialists who understand the intricacies of collecting and processing data and can develop any IT system. But they perceive the production process as a black box: a pile of metal is moving, something happens to it and the output is a slightly different pile of metal.

I am exaggerating, of course. In general, both business and IT understand the essence of each other's work to some extent, but there is still a gap between them. Alas and alack, more often than not, even a strong desire to help each other is not a guarantee of success. “Why should I get involved in someone else's process?” – probably such questions arise in the minds of each of them.

Those who have tried to build this dialogue understand perfectly well that sooner or later there comes a moment when misunderstandings begin to irritate both sides so much that it leads to a process explosion: everyone shouts at each other, escalates problems upwards, and even the top managers cannot immediately agree on them among themselves. In the end, of course, everyone calms down and starts working again, but guess what happens a couple of months later?

It is difficult to understand each other when one speaks French and the other speaks Chinese. Some kind of translator suggests itself – someone who would listen to each side and translate the thoughts of the other, some kind of translator, an intermediary.

This is the kind of person that is missing from those companies that have problems with this. I repeat, there are many reasons for failure, my goal is to reveal only one of them – the lack of a translator.

Being a translator is his key, but not his only task. He also acts as a scrum master, evaluates the effectiveness of all the proposed functionality (so to speak, an outside view), resolves internal conflicts and looks for non-standard solutions.

Internal lean managers are very well suited for this role. Knowledge of tools and the willingness to solve any problem greatly help the team, and top management can finally breathe a sigh of relief.

True, in one of the large industrial companies (where I studied this topic) they overcame this and successfully do without a translator. In my opinion, there are nuances, but that is not the point now.

Even at the inception of digital transformation in the company where I observed and went through this path, one of the Big Three consulting companies helped in this difficult task, and the decision to participate in the translator teams was made almost at the very beginning. I take this for granted, and I don’t try to convince others of the correctness of this approach, but I hint that perhaps it is worth thinking about.

So, some recommendations from my experience, What it takes to increase the success of digital transformation with the help of a lean manager:

1. Pre-vaccinate in the company Lean culture. In our example, Lean managers successfully got involved in the work, including thanks to many years of business system transformation. This foundation is not necessary, but without it it would be more difficult.

2. Manifest patience. Yes, yes, patience. Everyone remembers Buffett's famous phrase about pregnancy? Although, of course, a certain acceleration can be given. The question is in the readiness to involve significant resources. At first it was unclear, unpredictable and cautious. But with experience, the translators caught the track. Time is needed to build the transformation into the corporate culture.

3. Keep strong focus of TOPs on the digital until the system starts working on its own. Crookedly, askew, with sneezing, but on its own. Over time, the system will stabilize.

4. Break the business and IT paradigm that there is my process and there is his process. There is only general process and overall success (or failure).

How did the participation or absence of lean managers help your numbers?

*In addition to internal analytics and our own strategy, we used research from Naumen Research, Forbes, Yakov and Partners (formerly McKinsey), Bain & Company, HBR authors, conferences, and behind-the-scenes conversations with digital experts as sources of analytics and conclusions.