The PMO department (Project management office) — in French, Project Management Office — can be a real accelerator of the digital transformation of your organization through process automation. By engaging your program managers, you can get a consistent message across to your employees and drive change across your organization.
According to Forrester, the main reason why businesses fail in their transformation efforts is that they start by launching departmental initiatives in the areas of marketing, e-commerce, or technology management and graft them onto existing activities. The “digital bolting” approach can yield tactical results, but the strategic reality is quite different: your business needs a full reset.
Digital technology must be considered holistically. This is where program managers and the PMO come in to drive the transformation of the entire organization.
Harnessing the power of PMO digitization to reshape your organization
For many organizations, the biggest obstacle to digital transformation is cultural resistance. It will often be difficult to see past the pain of transformation and to understand the tangible benefits of digitizing operations. At the very least, you may run into a lack of commitment. At worst, you will face significant resistance.
While the responsibility for digital transformation may ultimately fall to a few people, it always requires the support from numerous stakeholders. Moreover, truly effective collaboration between company functions is only possible if it is managed by the board of directors.
Starting from the PMO to think bigger, innovate and create momentum
Once you've demonstrated the power of digital transformation, chances are your organization will better understand what it really is and how automation can benefit it.
It will then be time to repeat your success and think bigger to truly innovate. The most important step is to align your automation initiatives with your overall business strategy.
By replicating success in other areas of your business, you can quickly contribute to real change. For example, Adidas standardized its processes and made them reusable to enable the automation of various services including supply chain, marketing, finance, retail, and e-commerce through our partner Bizagi. This very successful initiative made it possible to reduce time to market by two-thirds compared to traditional in-house development and reduce supply chain operational costs by 60%.
Develop the PMO to extend digital transformation across the company
The automation of individual processes in the various business units is only the Start of digital transformation. True digital transformation, centered on the customer, takes place at the enterprise level. So at this stage, your challenge is to ensure that the culture of innovation you've just created extends to the very edge of the organization, by influencing the operations of the entire company.
To do this, you can rely on two advanced tools. One agile technology platform will allow for a unified approach to the digitalization of your entire business. This platform can be owned centrally by IT, but managed, controlled, and customized by the various business units.
Many successful digital leaders are also creating a CoE (Center of Excellence) to manage digitalization at the enterprise level. The Center of Excellence exists to provide best practices, training and support that align with a global strategy and vision for the digitalization of the company.
The combination of a stable and secure technology platform and a center of excellence that promotes best practices can also help you: business continuity planning to ensure that your organization works continuously to allow your employees to develop and to provide the best services or products to your customers.
In short, the key is in your internal operational structure. You can't effectively transform your business if you don't transform the way you operate, and that starts with your PMO.
About StoryShaper:
StoryShaper is an innovative start-up that supports its customers in defining their digital strategy and the development of automation solutions tailor-made.
Sources: StoryShaper, Bizagi, Forrester
