Leveraging OKRs For Digital Transformation Success

[Fred Champlain]

Digital transformations require focus and discipline to implement them successfully, and they are more likely to fail than succeed, according to Gartner who predicts that "by 2025, 70% of digital investments will fail to deliver the expected business outcomes…”. 

Transformations can also be expensive and complex, involving not only new technologies to learn and implement, but also involving deep changes to the organization itself that impact customers, employees, and suppliers.  Maintaining alignment of execution throughout a transformation is the essential challenge for leaders. 

In my experience creating and publishing a vision, strategic themes, and enterprise OKRs provides the alignment an enterprise needs for successful transformation outcomes. Managing transformations using OKRs, coupled with applying lean agile practices and principles, is key to avoiding transformation failures. “Measure What Matters” is the working maximum of OKRs, and is the title of the landmark book by John Doerr, who famously introduced Google to OKRs.

When initially implementing OKRs the management of the transformation itself is frequently overlooked.  Treating the transformation as a product is essential to maintaining focus despite the invariable setbacks that occur.  Leaders must have real-time visibility to how a transformation is proceeding to be effective, reprioritizing when necessary, and remaining mindful of governance guardrails. Transparent OKRs help keep the organization on track to achieve the benefits of future state outcomes while managing the business case for change and keeping teams motivated.

This is where establishing scalable agile competencies goes a long way towards success – organizations need the ability to manage the flow of transformation work, to support and synchronize collaborative teams, to invest in surfacing technical dependencies early on, all with the flexibility to adapt investment priorities based on feedback and lessons learned.  Transformations succeed by learning and adapting, adjusting plans and priorities by applying strategic portfolio planning. Those that don’t do this well become part of the failures cited by Garner.

Scaling of digital transformations beyond innovation pilots and across teams can be managed successfully using OKRs. Managing the business case for a transformation extends across several activities including the adoption of lean portfolio management, standing up a center of competency providing transformation coaching, implementing synchronous cadence and planning, designing agile solution architectures, and using value stream alignment to better identify dependencies, resources, and investments.

Enhancing capabilities and skills for the organization to create a sustainable transformation is essential for success, including customer-centric digital product management, deepening the engagement of employees and suppliers, and establishing a culture of continuous learning and growth. Defining an OKR strategy early on that is inclusive of organizational change is a critical aspect of managing the business of transformation.

The ServiceNow Goal Framework for SPM is a powerful and flexible framework that directly supports OKRs for scaling digital transformations including the automation of KPIs across the ServiceNow platform, as well as in-house goal management systems.  The framework can be used with ServiceNow’s SAFe Portfolio capability to obtain maximum value from your digital transformation investments regardless of where you are on your business agility journey.