Unifying High Performing Teams and Digital Transformation – It’s All About Principles


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The word principle is often used, but have you ever taken time to reflect on what it actually means?  What principles are needed to ensure teams can create a successful digital transformation, and be both cohesive and harmonious?

Principle is defined as “a fundamental truth or proposition that serves as the foundation for a system of belief or behaviour or for a chain of reasoning” (Oxford Dictionary).

Using this definition, what are the foundations of a high performing team and a digital transformation journey from a business perspective? DASA has defined an approach that guides and assists many organisations to have an efficient digital transformation. There are six principles, and I encourage you to think of your current organisation and provide a score out of six.

These six Transformation Principles are:

Customer-Centric Action – When was the last time your business gathered information from your end users and customers?  This does not just mean a three question survey after a transaction or a follow up email with a chance to win a prize.  Are you collecting information from end-users and using this information to objectively assess if your service or product is still fit for its purpose? Is your organisation able and willing to include customer feedback and ideas into your strategic planning cycle? Do customer needs drive your strategy?

Create With the End-in-Mind – Is the business process model used in your organization more important than meeting the future state that your customer wants? By starting with the end-in-mind, the products and services produced serve the needs of the customer and rather than fulfill a specific role or function. 

End-To-End Responsibility – In your organisation, where does the accountability and responsibility lie for the creation, delivery, and sustainment of a product or service until it enters its end-of-life phase? Is this accountability and responsibility found in silos where IT solutions are then handed over to operations to deploy and maintain?  A principle of DevOps is that teams are vertically organised, so they are united and accountable as a team from concept to end-of-life.

Cross-Functional Autonomous Teams – Vertical, integrated, and fully responsible teams need to be entirely independent throughout the whole lifecycle. Does your team have a balanced set of skills, rather than old-school IT specialists who are only knowledgeable or skilled in, for example, testing, requirements analysis, or coding ? Autonomous teams become a hotbed of personal development and growth – do your teams exist like this?

Continuous Improvement –  As circumstances and operating environments change, is your business able to continuously adapt to these changes? In a DevOps culture, a strong focus is put on continuous improvement to minimise waste, as well as to optimise for speed, costs, and ease of delivery in order to continuously improve the products/services offered. Is your business encouraging experimentation to embed and accept that learning comes from failures?  

Automate Everything You Can – What processes and approaches can be automated? Are you able to identify activities that have a reliance on manual analysis or data collation? The current approach to use AI supports this principle, and leads to more rapid continuous improvement cycles.

Principles for the use of AI in your business have also been developed by DASA and can be found here: https://www.dasa.org/about/dasa-devaiops-principles/

These principles provide a foundation for your digital transformation journey, and provide a powerful framework for business to consider in their strategic planning.

Additional information on the application of these principles can be found on the DASA website, and will also be covered in this blog series.


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