[MUSIC] I had the chance to lead ten big transformations in IT, for Fortune 500 companies. What are the lessons from this? First of all let me tell you something. I think five of them were quite successful. Three was so-so, and two were a complete disaster. What was the difference between the ones that were a clear success, and the ones that were a disaster? For me there is one reason, is the way you are managing the transformation. If you manage a transformation like a project, you might succeed and I'm gonna explain why. If you don't, people will not transform naturally. It takes a lot of analogy to transform. Once I was working with a CIO and we been designing the transformation. The plan was very good. The work stream were perfect. We knew exactly where we started from and where to go. And then, he said something which worried me. He said, Antoine, this is so important, it will become a daily job. I will manage your translation everyday. And I told him, certainly not, of course it is important. But it is a project, so a project you don't manage every day when you are the CIO. You will have use a transformation every week. On the one day is transformation day, but not every day. I said, no, no, I will think of it every day, every minute. I knew it was over because it was not going to manage as a project under transformation developer. So how should you manage a transformation? This cartoon is illustration of the change curve. The change curve has been developed at BCG. And it's a good illustration of how every project behave. Every project follows patterns. The pattern is first, you have to prepare. People are in a state of they worry, they don't really know what is happening. They know things are not going right, but they say maybe we could stay in this stage for a few times and the company isn't going to change. So there is this phase of preparation, where you have to convince the people that something should change. So you have to present the plan and then when the plan is ready you have to go into implementation. It's a big jump as you can see. Its a bit frightful to go into implementation because then you have unknown something and you must keep it. So you jump and go into implementation and then the journey begins. And it's going to be a tough journey, because as Machiavelli says, you will have against you, other people who have something to lose, and you will have with you, very few people who have something to gain. So here, what is happening is, that either you have your best of the year, and you may be successful or you don't, and you will fall into one of the traps that you can see. And then, finally, there is success. So the good news about this is that there is no surprise in transformation. You know that since the beginning, it's very difficult. You know that jumping is frightful. So it's normal that people are frightened. And then you know that there will be many traps on your way forward in many of them. It's normal, once I was running a transformation and we already were in a trap. And so the managing director of the company, he came and gave us a speech. And he said, you are stuck but it's okay, it's normal. It's a transformation project. Of course you are stuck and I don't care about it. You will find ways to go out of the trap and continue the transformation, I trust you. It was amazing for us. We thought we did something bad, but we did not, and the managing director knew it. So out of manager journey in a very concrete term. This is a project with a transformation, it does three steps. The first step is, of course, starting with a diagnosis, what am I and where do I want to go? It is very important, usually takes two to three months. It gives you a full picture of where is our organization and a full picture of where you want to go. In this step, you work with ten, 20 people, not more. You won't need more. I mean, basically, you want to have the manager, you will do many interviews, so what you want to have is up to 20 people with you. So, people you want to convince here is executive committee that you want to change, the business leaders and your Internet leadership team in your IT department. Once you have decided that, then you have to decide how you will do the transformation? What is the physics behind it? Because in the first two to three months maybe you have ten work streams. Architecture simplification, project time to market acceleration. Technology simplification. Hovering the span of control. Hovering the abundance of this organization, maybe. Streamlining the sourcing, standardizing a few IT system. So this could be the work streams. Okay, but it's still very much concertant like pepper like. How are we going to do that? And then you don't need 20 people to do it. You need much more then you need to have by work stream maybe five to ten people. So let's say you have ten work stream, you need to have 100 people involved, not full-time but 100 people involved. So you give them at the beginning what you want to do, and then you say okay, you have three weeks to write the whole chapter of exactly the chapter of the project. And you have to integrate what it is about, make sure that you understand and agrees. It's a very important phase, because there are many interdependencies. If you are going to work on infrastructure, it will have an impact on the way you do projects. If you want to standardize something, it will have an impact on the grammars. So all of the chapter should be reviewed by the leadership team of the IT. There you will do once a week a review of the chapter with the people. After three weeks, you are ready to go into the three months implementation plan. So 100 people now should work. Maybe it's time to go from 100 people to 300 people and starting to say, okay, it's easy to say I want to standardize or it's easy to say I want to application, but which one? How much we've cost, how should I do it? What is a detailed plan? At the end of the second phase, you are ready to have a plan with my stones. We clean my stone per each has a work stream. And you are ready to sign off. At this phase, you should sign off, meaning what? Each work team leader should say this is my plan. And I will sign it with my team, that we will deliver it on time. Then, you can start to monitor what is happening. On the sort phase, the key is transparency, because when you start to implement, you have jump, and you know it's gonna be tricky. So what you want to do as a CIO, is help your teams, help them solve their issues. Do what the managing director did with us. He told us, it's fine to make mistake, I'm there to support you. Then you need to have good reporting, a reporting team that helps you give transparency from top to bottom. Most of the transformation efforts fail because there is no transparency, because people are afraid to come and say, I have a red dot, I don't know how to do it. And so one of the CIO and the leadership team of the IT, is to say it's normal to come with red dots, we are there to help you solve them. If you do that, and if you have a weekly review, plus a monthly review with the business team and the executive committee, on the quarterly review with the executive committee then you'll be able to drive the transformation to the ultimate steps and to success. This is very important. As you can see, it might be a lot of her fault, spending one day a week with the world leadership committee of the IT this seems not possible. My main findings, over and over, is either you spend the time with your team because, is there anything more important than to transform? Or if you don't spend the time then you will not succeed. For the organization, for all the IT employees, knowing that their leadership committee of the IT is spending one day a week to review the transformation, to go into the processes, to go into the content, is a signal that we change. It's also a signal for the suppliers, and it's a signal for the business team. So, having this one day a week for one year to two years is something very important. It's a huge time commitment but is a key to success. I wish you a good journey in your transformation.
