How the digital change process works
My digital expertise helps you come unstuck and facilitate change by solving your digital problems. You may need help with :
Adopting new tech at team level
Reigniting stalled or slow digital change projects
Plugging skill gaps that prevent digital change
Overcoming resistance to change caused by team dynamics
Building stronger relationships with your audience
Reviewing or creating digital products in response to market changes
Boosting your digital fundraising
Measuring your digital change more effectively
Or something else entirely. Whether you're dealing with a large-scale organisational strategy or a smaller team project, I can help.
My process
Over two decades spent helping the UK charity sector overcome their biggest stumbling blocks, I’ve developed a framework to prioritise and plan a coherent path to change. My process combines strategy and practical change and is just as effective at scale as it is on smaller team or project plans, team optimisation, audience journey design and workshop facilitation.
Tailor made
I always design a tailor-made response to your needs and work flexibly in a way that best suits the project to deliver the results you need.
Collaborative
Throughout the project I am in regular contact with your project lead, keeping you up to date on progress. You are an active participant in designing next steps. We work with stakeholders and teams to design and own solutions together.
Measurable
To measure progress, we can use the Digital Maturity Assessment or define other KPIs.
Connected
Organisational change is complex and it takes time. I sometimes bring in other digital consultants from the UK and the US to guide you through the process. I’m also happy to discuss collaborating with experts or agencies you’re already working with if our work aligns.
The process involves three main stages:
Where you are now: Using desk research, interviews with your people and a Digital Maturity Assessment, we'll explore the main challenges holding you back.
Desk research: Analysing your strategies, data and how you currently use digital.
Stakeholder interviews: Uncovering your team culture and how your organisation works.
Digital Maturity Assessment: A simple way to gauge how digitally mature your organisation is.
Where you want to be: Understanding what "good" looks like, figuring out what your priorities should be and creating expected digital maturity targets to work towards.
How to get there: Deep dive workshops to get clear on root causes of problems, design solutions, prioritise the actions that will make the most difference, and build those actions into a phased roadmap of things we can do and test.
The roadmap will be a living document that details the actions we’re going to test to achieve your vision, and a process for how to review those tests and measure progress.
A client wanted to develop high-quality audience journeys. They knew that their current audience journey breaks down in several places. The reasons for this were siloed content planning, multiple handoff points, skillset concentrated in one team leading to bottlenecks and deletion of email leads due to consent management in the database. The last issue was prioritised by the client because it dealt with a few important (but not all) issues around audience journey implementation.
Measuring success
To measure progress, we can use the Digital Maturity Assessment. The initial report forms a baseline for us to set targets for specific areas. Then, after a period, we’ll repeat the survey to see how things have changed.
Alternatively we can set KPIs which will help you optimise your plan and measure progress.
What you'll get
A report outlining your organisation’s key themes, challenges and strengths, along with recommendations for where to improve.
A roadmap showing how to get from where you are to where you want to be. This will be a plan, based on workshop recommendations, that you can test and measure over time. The final report will include:
Baseline metrics - Digital Maturity Assessment or another baseline report
Review and recommendations of areas to focus on
A prioritised list of things to put on your roadmap across People-Process-Technology
Prioritised roadmap phased over short-medium-long term
The principles
My approach is based on two core principles supported by practical frameworks that put those principles into action.:
Putting people first: A human-centred approach that values group thinking and decision-making.
To embody this principle in my work, I use diamond-shaped thinking: Inspired by human-centred design, this approach means we'll switch between thinking big and wide with your teams and colleagues, and then focusing in and prioritising. It allows us to give a voice to every concern, before we hone in on a plan of action. Your stakeholders get a say in what we prioritise, and you benefit from their expertise and get their buy-in.
With one client, a burning issue was delivery of projects in a timely manner also reflected in a low digital maturity rating for Project Management competency. In our analysis, we identified the problem to solve was the project management process. But when we started to co-design the project management process, our diamond-shaped approach revealed that we were missing the real issue: people not taking accountability. The outcome was that we switched focus to the team manifesto. We co-designed a new way to help people describe what they expect from each other and hold each other accountable.
2. Looking beyond the tech: Ensuring digital transformation leads to real, tangible change.
Here, I follow the framework of People-Process-Technology: Whether we’re looking at a problem or planning a roadmap, we’ll always consider these three things:
People: Culture, skills and training
Process: Ways of working and planning
Technology: Systems and data
Because a change in one area means changes are needed in the other two. For example, if you introduce a new technology platform, you’ll probably need to update your processes and train people to use it.
If you have any questions or discuss how I can help, do get in touch.