If companies today want to remain competitive in the long term, they have to digitalize their processes and workflows. Hardly anyone disputes this anymore, because skillful digitalization means faster processes, greater efficiency, simpler communication and, last but not least, often cost savings - all indispensable benefits in today's world, where the saying «time is money» is truer than ever.

Digital transformation projects often bring unexpected challenges despite good planning and clear goals during implementation. How can these be mastered or best be avoided altogether?

There are three main prerequisites for the good success of transformation projects:

• Change starts at the top: The management must stand united behind the transformation, exemplify it and communicate it adequately before implementation.
• Employees must be taken along from the beginning on the digital journey by the management, involved and informed in advance about the effectively planned changes so that they understand the benefits of the innovations and also welcome them.
• The transformation must be well planned, communicated internally and implemented professionally.

Motivation is not the problem

In many cases, both management and IT managers in companies are well aware that internal and external processes should be digitalized in order to make workflows more efficient, because employees are often working at the limit of their performance capacity. In principle, they would like to drive change and would also be motivated to do so. However, they simply do not have the necessary resources to deal with the issue in depth. It happens, of course, that not all members of management recognize the need for and benefits of a digitization project and still need to be convinced.

If companies in such a situation decide to tackle a transformation project, there is often no way around external support.

Digitalization with the help of external know-how

With our extensive experience in managing transformation projects, we can offer optimal support in the design and implementation of digitalization projects. In the process, our customers receive all IT services from a single source and communicate with a central contact person: 

• Communication: We communicate the concrete benefits of the project clearly and comprehensibly to those responsible and explain the background to the employees in an understandable way so that everyone involved is equally convinced of the planned changes. It is crucial that the project goal is made clear. The employees should not be replaced, but relieved and given more time for their core competencies.
• At the beginning of every project, we analyze the company's processes in detail, in order to elicit the existing digitialization potential and to understand the company's processes precisely. It is crucial that we can accurately estimate the costs of all potential changes to be introduced, including follow-up costs and effort. This enables us to propose the most cost-effective solutions and take budgetary constraints into account.
• We then examine how the platforms and systems already in place in the company can best be linked to the new applications. Solutions that are operated «on premise» can be combined in the same way as solutions in the cloud.
• In line with the planned solution, we design the necessary web and enterprise applications via our developer platform OutSystems - lean and precisely tailored to the company's individual needs. 

• For the introduction and implementation, we prepare easy-to-understand explanations for employees that convey the benefits of the innovations right from the start.
• In some companies, it has proven successful to test the changes with a selected pilot group before the company-wide roll-out. The participants in the pilot group almost always also become ambassadors who credibly and authentically communicate the benefits of the digitization project and advertise it internally.
• We absorb personnel bottlenecks during the digitalization project and prepare the specialists optimally for the newly introduced systems and software. In this way, the additional effort associated with the conversion remains manageable.

In this way, we prepare digitalization projects from A - Z. We continue to accompany and advise our customers after the transformation to ensure that all processes run as planned and desired. For us, projects are only completed when our customers are completely satisfied with their implementation and the result.  

Have you been planning to digitalize your processes in a meaningful way for a long time, but do not have the necessary resources internally for planning and implementation? Then we would be happy to take over the entire digitalization project for you. Contact our OutSystems expert, Stefan Heer, and discuss your plans with him.