Creating your digital transformation roadmap: A comprehensive 10-step strategy guide

Digital transformation is more than just adding digital solutions to your business. You also need to understand how integrating these new technologies can benefit your business, both internally and externally. When done correctly, a successful digital transformation roadmap will help yield faster innovation and increased profitability.

Many benefits of adopting a digital transformation roadmap are not just for enterprises but small businesses as well.

These include:
 

Building a successful digital transformation roadmap is not a single-step process. In fact, it could take years to complete, not factoring in additional obstacles you may encounter along the way. Follow these 10 steps to build your own digital transformation roadmap.

1. Assess the situation.
   You need to ask yourself what’s working, what’s not, and the reasons for both. This involves looking at all your processes in place, areas of improvement, and system gaps, and then determining the expected results from your digital transformation.
2. Establish your vision.
   What do you want to accomplish? How do your goals stand within your organization today? Your digital transformation starting point should be the existing vision for the company, overall mission, and values. Digital transformation entails a huge shift in how you’ve previously worked and how your entire organization will work moving forward, so having a solid vision in place will help.
3. Get leadership buy-in.
   Make sure that the leadership within your organization understands the core purpose of this digital transformation and has clarity about what it entails. By aligning your digital transformation with your leadership team’s vision from the very beginning, those in leadership positions will be able to communicate that vision and future positive results much faster to the rest of the organization and external stakeholders.
4. Create a solid taskforce.
   You’ll need a high-caliber launch team of developers, designers, scrum masters, and data scientists to ensure your digital transformation roadmap gets off the ground. They’ll need to be able to seamlessly integrate new technologies without disrupting current and legacy technologies.
5. Prioritize small but meaningful tasks.
   As you start to implement your plan, challenges will arise. You’ll need to identify which tasks will result in high-impact project opportunities that can yield quick wins with minimal effort. Once you’ve found these simple and easy-to-deploy projects, create a plan for solving them. Also, see if there’s any dependencies that connect to your tasks that could potentially slow down your process and a plan on how to expedite them quicky.
6. Get the right tools.
   You’ll need the right software to ensure that all teams are able to get involved in the digital transformation process. Tools that help gather feedback, employee communication channels, training materials, and digital adoption platforms can all help employees learn, monitor, and navigate the transformation journey—your tech will help enable others to get their jobs done.
7. Nurture a tech-ready culture.
   You’ve already got leadership buy-in for the initial launch, but you need to make sure the rest of your company buys into the vision as well. Before you make any changes, make sure that employees can see the value in your digital transformation journey and the new technologies you’ve brought on for your organization. Discuss the major goals of your digital transformation roadmap, steps to accomplish them, and future state. This will help to reassure teams that these new technologies will make work easier and reduce errors and frustrations.
8. Add new tech.
   Now that your people are primed and ready, you can start to invest in new technologies that offer your organization value. To ensure you’ll get successful results, your teams need the right tools—from AI-powered tools to cloud-computing platforms—to manage, store, and secure your data.
9. Set the pace.
   The first few months will set the pace of your entire digital transformation journey. It only takes a short amount of time to see the beginning of your results, so your first steps are critical. Communicate timelines and manage expectations with frequent check-ins and be sure to acknowledge accomplishments.
10. Stay agile.
    Ensuring an agile project management style for implementing, assessing, and responding to any resulting strategy changes will make sure you have a trusted, collaborative effort. By breaking your project into sprints followed by feedback, you’ll always know what’s working and what isn’t. Since you and your team are always watching and reacting to real-time results, you’re able to easily adjust when needed to improve the entire transformation journey.

Now that your strategy roadmap is set and you have the steps to put your plan into action, you need to implement it into your current business strategy. Here are three best practices to ensure a successful digital transformation roadmap deployment.

1. Get employee buy-in too. While you’ve gotten teams to buy into your transformation, you need to keep them engaged and motivated throughout the process. Designating trusted team members to function as transformation ambassadors and easily communicate the benefits of this process will help others get on board and feel confident about the upcoming changes. Make sure these members have succinct content, talking points, and statistics to discuss the plan with other employees with ease.
2. Accept that change happens fast. Because you’re running at an accelerated pace, it might seem like what worked yesterday has changed today. You’ll be constantly trying out new technologies to see what works best. Communicating milestones, dates to reach goals, and managing expectations will help tackle this speedy transformation.
3. Share wins early and often. A digital transformation roadmap can take months or even years to complete. You want your team to stay motivated throughout so once you’ve achieved important milestones or goals, make sure to tell the team, look back at what your team accomplished, and celebrate.

Despite the adoption of new technologies, many businesses are still struggling to develop effective digital transformation strategies. Digital transformation takes a long time, and even when you feel like you have a strong strategy, you and your entire organization need to keep the momentum, be patient with the process, and stay committed to seeing it succeed.

Choosing a solution that can prioritize your needs, empower your IT department, and simplify and expedite tasks will be key in how your business stays ahead in the marketplace. Microsoft 365 can help bring your digital transformation to life. By leveraging the Microsoft 365 suite, you can improve business efficiency, accelerate product innovation, boost employee performance, and increase customer satisfaction. Find the solution that works best for you.