Playbook: Everything you need to know to kickstart your enterprise transformation

Here, we’ll help you understand what enterprise transformation is, defining it with clear criteria and examples of the various types of transformation. We enable you to determine whether your organization needs a transformation, as well as distinguish between truly transformative efforts and the continuous improvement and iteration that your organization already practices.

Step up to the starting line, as we offer the critical items needed to successfully set up, plan, and execute an enterprise transformation. Learn how to avoid the pitfalls and ensure your transformation endures — reinforced by an organizational culture that mitigates the risk of employees returning to old habits.

Developed by our enterprise transformation advisors, with decades of cumulative experience across various industries, this is your premiere resource on enterprise transformation. We capture key takeaways and resources at the end of each section, to equip you on your transformative journey.

Understanding whether a transformation is necessary must be approached carefully. Enterprise transformations, by their nature, are vast projects — they shouldn’t be taken lightly. They are also likely to happen one way or the other: according to a study from MIT Sloan Management Review., more than believe digital transformation will disrupt their industry. We hope this highlights the need to choose carefully as to how, when, and under which conditions to proceed.

To determine whether to transform your business, you must carefully assess your current state (internal factors), your ecosystem or landscape (external factors), and your organization’s future state (strategic goals and/or business objectives). The first two factors are key to understanding where your organization stands today, in its current state, while the third one focuses on envisioning its future — covered in more detail in the planning section.

To help with your assessment, the examples below outline criteria that signal the need for transformation and share specific questions you can ask to help determine whether an enterprise transformation could benefit your organization.

The overarching criteria includes:

• A change that impacts multiple operational or business units, functions, teams, or key groups.
• A change that drives strategic impact, relating to the success of the business as a whole (i.e., a holistic change).
• A change that addresses a problem that threatens the survival or longevity of the business.
• A change that addresses a problem that has both internal and external contributing factors or is otherwise multi-faceted or high magnitude in nature.

This is not an exhaustive list, but it represents some of the most clear-cut examples where a transformation was necessary. It’s best to assess each situation as unique, even if it seems analogous to one of the scenarios. See the criteria above and answer the specific questions below.

Additionally, don’t hesitate to engage one of our advisors to work with you to determine if a transformation is required. Enterprise transformation has long been prevalent among organizations like yours. In fact, as far back as 2017, research firm Ipsos (engaged by MNP to conduct a survey of Canadian business decision makers) found that 86 percent of respondents were experiencing or anticipated a business transformation in the next 12 months.

Ask the following questions to help determine whether transformation is appropriate. Be conscious of who you are asking — different groups may have different answers. Explorative exercises — like the Five Whys problem-solving method — and follow-up questions can help you dig deeper into the answers you provide.

• Are we experiencing any of the scenarios listed above?
• Are we experiencing problems or situations that meet the criteria listed above?
• Are we able to solve our problems or reach our goals given our current allocation of resources, systems and processes, technologies, and organizational values?
• Have we exhausted the potential iterative changes that could help solve the issue we are experiencing?
• Are there landscape or ecosystem changes impending that we’re not prepared for or do not fully understand?
• Are we falling dramatically short on our goals, such that iterative improvement would take too long to reach them? Or such that we would fall too far behind the market or competitors?
• If we continue this strategic direction without making dramatic changes, will we solve our problem or reach our goal?

After answering the questions, you’ll have to thoroughly analyze the answers to determine whether a transformation is required or if an iterative change will suffice. Factors like urgency, desired impact, readiness, resource availability, and risk tolerance should also be considered. 

A comprehensive analysis presumes you have the necessary data points to evaluate. Measurement is a critical component of any type of transformation. In fact, achieving the necessary measures, and instilling the values and behaviours required for reliable and representative data capture, entry, and analysis, may warrant a transformation all on their own.

Without a rigorous measurement system that includes leading indicators and KPIs tied to your business objectives, you may not be able to determine if you need to transform. And, if you opt to move forward, you won’t be able to measure the progress of a transformation. Consider what you will need to measure, how you will measure it, and whether you have the necessary capabilities to do so. If you don’t yet have them, be sure to note this as you present your case for a transformation. 

• There are specific situations that tend to require a transformative effort, including:
  • Mergers, acquisitions, or other organizational changes involving integration.
  • Large-scale societal changes.
  • Technology changes (such as generative AI).
  • Competitive or market pressures.
  • Changes in strategy or leadership.
  • Regulatory changes.
  • There are specific criteria that dictate when a transformative approach is necessary, including:
    • Breadth of proposed change (i.e., across multiple business units, key groups, entities, etc.).
    • Impact of proposed change (i.e., business altering or otherwise strategic in nature).
    • Whether the change is multi-faceted or affects both internal and external elements.
• Be certain you need a transformation before you begin. Transformations can be resource intensive, difficult to achieve, and run the risk of reversion.

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To get started, let’s explore how to set the foundation for a successful transformation from the outset. This includes evaluating initial parameters, outlining initial steps, and identifying common pitfalls to avoid. For how to formulate a plan, see Section 4.

Understanding the desired future state is critical for your starting conditions. This is known as the phase of the transformation lifecycle. Of course, you must have had some idea of the future state before the project began — ensure that it is considered, built-up, torn-down, and documented, before the ground is broken.  

Setting up your transformation for success requires strategic planning, meticulous alignment between key groups, conditions for scalability, and the right people to lead the effort. Here are some key considerations to help you make sure your starting conditions are optimal and provide a starting point. 

Behold the vision

Develop a compelling vision for your transformation. This vision should include your future state, the goals you are achieving, and the problems you are solving. It should be aligned with your business strategy, look into the future, and clearly articulate why you are embarking on this journey.

Ensure you gather input and feedback from relevant groups — especially customers — as it can dictate candidates for change and success measures. That’s because customer-centricity makes sure the problem you are solving is the right one. This will also help you formulate your value proposition, so it remains compelling to the customer.

Write the narrative

Craft a story for how you will reach your vision. This should be just the initial cut, and you should be prepared for the story to evolve as you go through the journey. Having a narrative will help your key groups understand why you are pursuing the vision and how it could come to be. This high-level, notional representation will be critical for securing buy-in, advice, and facilitating the necessary connections to proceed — before you reach the stage where you are articulating a proper business case.

Nominate the sponsor

Choose your executive sponsor carefully. They may not be the person who will lead the transformation (the operational lead), but they will own the outcomes at the highest level. They ensure the right doors are open to pursue your goals, in terms of prioritization, people, and resources. Their key responsibilities will include advocating to — and securing buy-in from — leadership, making strategic decisions, and advocating for the cultural changes necessary to support the future state. It is essential to appoint an executive sponsor who: 

• Has been through a transformation before
• Is comfortable taking risks
• Has sufficient executive authority and credibility within the organization
• Has the capacity and bandwidth for a transformation

Engage the leadership team

It’s critical to manage expectations every step of the way. This must happen at the highest level, whether that is the board of directors or the c-suite. Meaningfully engage them to secure their support, align on priorities, and establish proper governance. Ensure they are primed for the overall impact of the transformation, and the (often large) number of resources required (more on this below).

Boards (or other leaders serving such functions) have a high-level, strategic focus on the transformation and should be engaged in shaping the transformation narrative. Participation will help the board clearly understand the vision and value proposition. Board members usually have varying depths of understanding of transformation’s impact on technology or operations, especially if the transformation is digital or focuses on AI. In this case, we strongly recommend hosting facilitated sessions with your board and industry leaders who can translate digital details into business implications.

While these steps will serve as a good foundation to begin your transformative journey, it is important to be conscious of potential pitfalls early on. The sooner you’re aware of them, the sooner you can anticipate them and mitigate their impact.

Under-resourcing

During setup, boards can be presented with notional business cases that don’t include the unknowns. This can result in a severely underfunded transformation, delays, and risks leaving the execution incomplete. 
 
Instead, the executive sponsor should present a high-level business case or value case highlighting the ambiguity — like a budget ranging from plus or minus 50 percent to start — and any known unknowns. They must explain the risks and gaps and establish a timeline for when the business case will be refined and

As your transformation progresses, you will gain a clearer understanding of what expenses are required. Teams often discover — after the budget has been approved — that they actually need a separate solution for a particular function, or that integrating components of their future state comes at an unforeseen development cost. Usually, your budget estimate is more like plus or minus 20 percent after the design phase. Providing a range quantifying the minimum and expected maximum amount of budget, which will narrow as you progress, is probably the best you can do. Be sure to set this expectation and include milestones that dictate when costs will become clearer.  
 
Note that teams — and providers — with more experience tend to be able to develop business cases with higher degrees of certainty, because they know from experience the sorts of curveballs that cause deviations from the budget.

Insufficient governance

Often, the transformation doesn’t clearly articulate what governance will look like. It is important for both the board and leadership to understand what is being asked of them, their role in the process, what decisions they are expected to make, and what else is expected of them to progress the transformation. They will need to know what data points they’ll receive to support the governance. Transformation governance often differs significantly from traditional lines of sight in that decisions are pushed to functional experts — to preserve agility and speed of execution. Thresholds for approvals may also be different than usual, as governing bodies will need to make decisions without all the information.

Ill-defined scope or competing interests

Leadership may want to clearly understand the scope — and that’s a problem, because it is nearly impossible at this stage. In fact, defining scope too early in the process is a hinderance, given the breadth and scalability considerations of a transformation. This is why it is so important for your executive sponsor to have experienced a transformation previously. It’s so they can say, with authority, that they understand the desire and explain why it is ill-suited at this time. They must advocate for flexibility and agility in the face of uncertainty.

Ambiguous timelines

Pushback from leadership on (even knowing) the amount of time a transformation stands to take can limit its scope — or even derail it entirely. Like its scope in the previous point, a transformation’s duration is difficult to predict. Some would even argue that it never ends, as it takes ongoing effort to avoid reversion. Such ambiguity can be tough for your board to swallow. The best way to mitigate it is to set the expectation early, and have a clearly defined vision, goals, measurement framework, and story. You will get closer to having clear timelines once you create a roadmap in the planning phase. 

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• Develop and present a clear, compelling vision that is properly connected to the organizational strategic outcomes — critical to the overall success of the organization.
• Choose an executive sponsor who:
  • is experienced
  • is credible
  • has authority
  • has capacity and bandwidth
  • has the right risk tolerance
• Engagement from the top down is critical.
• Anticipate pitfalls, communicate them, and mitigate their likelihood.

Planning your transformation is half the battle. A careful balance of specificity and flexibility is required — more specifics than when pursuing leadership buy-in and participation, but not so prescriptive that you lose agility. You will need to be able to make changes. 

Beyond the steps taken to set up a transformation, planning will be critical to a smooth execution. You need to have the right resources at the right stages, ensure the criteria for successful transformations are met or achievable, set expectations of prospective participants (have help in reserve), and enable proactive measurement to track progress — so that you know when it may be time to pivot.

The critical outputs from your planning activities will include a transformation blueprint and a roadmap. These are the culminating documents of the prioritize roadmap phase of the transformation lifecycle. 

There are several elements to consider in formulating your plan. We have posed them as questions, which will serve as good practice for when your sponsor, board, and team start to wonder.

• Plan to have a team that is well-aligned to the transformation leader, functionally diverse, and with different areas of expertise.
• Include specific, progressive milestones on your strategic roadmap.
• Measure progress at every stage, with quantitative measures, where possible. Roadmap progress is necessary, but not sufficient, to know when to course correct.
• Prioritize milestones that enable measurement operationalization.

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So, you’ve got an executive sponsor, leadership participation, the right plan, the right people, and ample resources to pursue your new future state. Now, it’s time to turn your vision into reality.  

The implementation phase (or solution phase) is where the rubber hits the road. The negotiation and planning of the previous phases subside, and the execution and operationalization elements come to the forefront. It is the phase where it becomes obvious if the prerequisites from previous phases were enough. And it isn’t without its challenges — especially when it comes to making adjustments to earlier deliverables. 

Read on for advice on how you can ensure your transformation achieves its desired goal state, bringing your business to its full potential. The guidance in this section will also help your project run smoothly, adapt to change, resist creep, and stay on time and on budget.

Trace back to business objectives

Make sure the decisions made — and actions dictated — are aligned to particular business objectives. Sure, the overall transformation is aligned with your strategic business objectives. But, from the board to the individual contributors on the transformation team, people will want to add process changes, new systems, and other long-standing wish-list items to the project. The additions may not be relevant or timely and can contribute to scope creep. This could delay your timeline or even lead to a never-ending transformation. 
 
Be sure to document how decisions are linked to a specific objective, so that the criteria for what should be added or included is clear and easily articulated. Phrases like “As long as we’re doing…” or “We may as well add…” are good prompts to verify this.

Accelerate the decision-making process

Timely decisions are crucial to maintaining the momentum of the overall transformation, eliminating bottlenecks, and enabling those quick wins you identified earlier (more on those in the next section). 
 
Many organizations have cumbersome decision-making processes that add unnecessary complexity and slow delivery (this type of problem could warrant a transformation of its own). Approval chains should be streamlined, and real-time data should be leveraged to make informed, quick, data-driven decisions. 
 
Revisions to your overall governance process, identifying and refining decision-making roles and processes, and deciding who is accountable for decisions at the early stages will be essential. 
 
Not all the decisions for your transformation need to come from the top. Empowering execution teams to make decisions, focusing on delivering in sprints, and delegating smaller, incremental decisions (that can be corrected quickly) will help keep your transformation agile.

Realize value early and quickly

Focus your resources on high-impact, low-effort milestones first, whenever possible. This is important for achieving initial momentum, as well as for dispelling the notion that the project will be years long and slow to add value. Quick wins also aid your transformation team’s morale.

Here are some examples of quick wins to get your creativity flowing:

• Refine a high-impact process that affects many employees and/or customers to yield immediate efficiency gains.
• Automate repetitive tasks by eliminating redundant, manual tasks to save time and reduce opportunity for errors.
• Eliminate bottlenecks in approval processes to enable faster decision-making and quicker project execution.

Implement the transformation through sprints (the Agile methodology can help with non-software projects) that yield immediate value, relative to your overarching goals.

Balance speed and agility

While quick results are essential, rushing through key phases (e.g., design or testing) can lead to long-term problems and overspending. Strike a balance by ensuring each transformation phase is executed with high-quality standards while maintaining momentum. The standards may vary by organization, but should focus on: 

• Ensuring a comprehensive design has been completed. This means allotting enough design sessions and making sure that the design team have the right knowledge and expertise.
• Leaving enough time to properly test the future state. This may include systems integration and user acceptance testing (UAT) of the transformation’s digital elements or conducting a dress rehearsal on the operational end.

Start scaling from the get-go

You need to design and deliver your transformation with long-term scalability in mind. This means you should build the operations, processes, and infrastructure to support expansion and growth without constantly needing to rebuild or overhaul. Each of your processes, governance structures, and workforce capabilities need to be able to accommodate growth in the volume they process, as well as adapt to anticipated scenarios (e.g., customers or suppliers in new geographic locations) that could present their own hurdles. Again, you don’t need to solve for all of them now, but you need to consider the possibilities carefully to ensure your transformation is flexible enough for contingencies. 
 
Approaching your transformation with this mindset will ensure smooth growth and help prevent a reactive or piecemeal expansion. Remember, having this mindset doesn’t mean you need to be able to handle a million orders when you’re only getting a thousand. It means having a progression path that supports the growth-case scenario without requiring a complete rebuild.

Don’t underestimate the complexity of the human factor

We can’t emphasize this enough — executives should not focus solely on technology or process improvements without considering the impact of people on the equation or the integration of all these components. This goes beyond traditional change management and requires carefully planning the desired experience from day one (and narrating the journey at every step). It’s not just about solving today’s problems — it’s also about enabling tomorrow’s opportunities.

• Implement an accelerated decision process. To preserve the quality of the choices, establish clear criteria for how to proceed:
  • Will the decision help achieve the desired outcome? If yes, how?
  • Is the decision in scope?
• Remain conscious of the momentum of the project by prioritizing quick wins to highlight progress and the organization’s capacity for change.
• Don’t underestimate the human factor, giving careful consideration to how people (e.g., customers, employees, and users) will experience the change.

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If you have considered the long-term implications from the planning phase and stuck with it at the execution phase, your transformation should have a solid foundation of scalability. As your business grows, you will have leading indicators as to whether your transformation is standing up to it. 

Similarly, sustainability — or persistence — is so much easier if you have been communicating throughout the transformation process. It’s highly related to cultural change. Your employees buy in to the changes and the overall transformation, because they saw results as you achieved and communicated milestones throughout the process.

You may already have evidence of the organization reacting to the leading indicators that things weren’t working — and pivoting when that happens. If you don’t, you have the right structure in place to do so.

Solid plan notwithstanding, organizational resistance to change is a common thing to experience in an enterprise transformation, especially during the sustain and measure phase of its lifecycle. To combat this, implementing innovative approaches to maintaining momentum is the key to fostering lasting change. 

Firstly, ongoing and interactive communications are crucial. Beyond transitional email blasts or corporate memos, create dynamic touchpoints that are engaging, such as digital workshops, live Q&A sessions, or even gamified updates that encourage active participation. Additionally, consider leveraging suitable digital social platforms to share project milestones and success stories that reinforce the benefits of the new world. 

If resistance persists, create an anonymous, transparent channel for employees and/or key groups to report instances of reversion, but take it a step further. Incentivize the reporting process with recognition programs for those who actively contribute to maintaining the new systems. This could be as simple as weekly shout outs or a rewards system that highlights change champions within the organization.

Even if cultural change was part of your transformation, something that is much harder to change are employee and organizational values.

Sustaining and scaling a transformation after the initial implementation is critical to realizing long-term value. For you as executives and transformation leaders, the work doesn’t end at implementation — this phase marks the beginning of making sure the transformation continues to deliver results and evolves with the business. 

The project team must be clearly accountable for this. Continue your communications and refer to your metrics for adoption and compliance with the new directive for how things are done. 

Support of transformation should be embedded into your organizational culture to prevent the company from reverting to the old familiar ways. Other values that will contribute to that culture include continuous improvement and a desire to optimize technology, operations, and people. The ways these values are adhered to within an organization can vary, but examples we’ve seen include continuous automation, demonstrating data-driven decisions, and adopting AI. 

Including customer considerations throughout your transformation will help with scale and sustainability. On the flip side, scaling your transformation without keeping your customers top of mind can lead to misalignment with market needs and lost opportunities. To prevent this, continuously gather feedback from your customers to ensure your transformation delivers the intended value. Incorporate customer insights into downstream activities from the transformation, such as adjusting products, services, or experiences. It’s easy to say you have engaged the customer at the start of the project — this is necessary, but not sufficient — it must continue throughout.

• Transformation must be embedded into your organizational culture.
• Continuous improvement must be among the organizational values you reinforce throughout the project. Transformation is not an extra burden; it’s business as usual.
• Scale can’t come at the expense of the customer experience. Customer-centricity must persist throughout the transformation process.

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You now have a solid foundation of understanding to pursue your enterprise transformation. Transformation will never be easy, but now you’ll be better prepared to take the first few steps of the journey. 

The guidance shared is applicable across a broad range of organizations, goals, and transformation types — yet we must be clear that one size does not fit all. No two transformations are the same. From the broad strokes to the nuances, there will be differences you need to account for. Your transformation will be inherently unique.

Fortunately, there is a team of people who have seen transformations of every variety, who can guide you through yours. While this marks the conclusion of our discussion of enterprise transformation, you can read on to understand how MNP can help. If you’re wondering whether your business would benefit from a structured transformation, reach out to our team today.

Our Enterprise Transformation team is designed to solve complex business, operational, and technology challenges for our clients. 

Our practitioners have unique combinations of consulting and industry experience across a wide range of markets and sectors. We work with our valued clients to lead full-cycle transformation consulting engagements. This includes the initial discovery, strategy, design, planning, initiative definition and prioritization, as well as final implementation support and sustaining the recommendations and intended outcomes.

We bring a comprehensive range of service offerings to each transformation. Our team uses an integrated delivery approach that prevents siloed workstreams and rework, enabling our clients to translate their goals and strategies into execution.
 
At MNP, our Transformation Advisory is led by our experienced and visionary partners, who bring deep expertise across industries, technologies, and business functions. Each has a proven track record of guiding organizations through complex transformations, from strategy to execution, ensuring sustainable growth and innovation.

• Transformation is challenging, but necessary to survive and thrive.
• While the processes, structures, teams, and technologies that are changing are specific to you, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to the approach. What we have described here is tried and true, and there are numerous resources available to help you.
• You don’t need to pursue transformation alone — we have advisors who can guide you every step of the way.

Reach out to our team of transformation advisors, who bring a broad bench of cross-industry experience. Contact MNP Digital today.