DX Talk - Digital Transformation

Digital transformation member roles

01/07/202412/05/2023 by DX Talk

Digital transformation member roles. The eighth part of Acquiring and Organizing Talent to Drive Digital Transformation (DX) Success explores the roles and importance of each member in a digital transformation organization. Learn the roles of product owners, project managers, designers, developers, and operators and their contributions to project success.

Digital transformation member roles and organizational importance

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of building a digital transformation organization around experienced and highly skilled people whenever possible. Once you’ve gone through this painstaking process and have a minimal DX organization in place, it’s time to speed up execution. Just like any other IT project, a DX organization is made up of teams to execute individual projects, and people are assigned detailed R&Rs (roles and responsibilities). First, let’s take a look at how a typical IT project team is organized for better understanding.

Key roles in a digital transformation project: Product Owner

There is a role called the Product Owner (PO) or Product Manager who takes ownership of the entire product and oversees the entire project (you could call them the DX leader). This is the person who analyzes the ideas coming from various sources, decides whether or not to proceed with the project, defines what to actually build, and further decides on the minimum feature set required and the release date. They lead the entire project team and are responsible for making the final decisions about what needs to be done to make things work.

The role of the designer: the importance of user experience

Next up are the designers. In addition to GUI designers, who produce traditional design deliverables, there are UI designers, who define the user interface, and UX designers, who design the user experience. Of these, UX has become increasingly important in recent years. They design the user experience based on a deep understanding of the people who will be using the product. They are responsible for the navigation and flow of what is offered. It’s no exaggeration to say that most of the apps we’re so comfortable using on mobile are the result of these UX designers.

Project manager: responsible for project schedule, resources, and costs

Then there’s the project manager. Often referred to as PMs, they are responsible for delivering the defined product on time, at cost, and with limited resources, meaning that they view the execution as a project and track and manage the scheduling and phasing of tasks to keep the project on schedule and within scope. Whereas the product manager or product owner described above is the larger role of defining how the product will be built, the project manager is the one who actually builds the product within a given timeframe. In the marketplace, these two roles are sometimes confused, but they are clearly distinct.

Developers: the key to project success

Then there are the engineers, or developers. Developers are the ones who make something out of nothing, and the success or failure of a real-world IT project often depends on them. Since most digital product deliverables are software, such as IT systems, web, or apps, the role of the developer is of utmost importance.

Developers are the invisible hands that use programming languages to make the product we’ve defined work, bringing the graphical screens and user experiences created by designers to life. Of course, there are many different types of developers, including programmers, architects, DBAs, front-end engineers, back-end engineers, and so on, but they all contribute to the creation of a product. The biggest role of a developer is to understand a given requirement, determine how to create it, and execute it.

Operators and marketers: roles in the ongoing success of your service

Next, there’s the operator. This is the person who is responsible for ensuring that the services that customers use and experience after launching a digital-based product run smoothly. Operators can be further broken down into service operations, system operations, and infrastructure operations. Service operations is what we often refer to as customer service.

They are responsible for responding to customer inquiries, checking and managing the operational metrics of the actual service. System operations, on the other hand, is responsible for maintaining the system as a whole from a development perspective. Infrastructure operations is responsible for maintaining the server infrastructure where the system is located. In recent years, the concept of DevOps has spread, and development and operation are sometimes combined. However, it’s important to keep in mind that development and operations are two distinct roles.

Finally, there’s product marketing. In some cases, product managers are also marketers, but digital products or services require different competencies because they require marketing activities on various online channels. It’s also worth noting that there are different areas of marketing that are optimized for digital environments, such as marketing based on direct communication with customers through social media and performance marketing, such as data-driven growth hacking.

When you look at IT projects in detail, the job roles are very different. It’s important to recognize these differences when assembling and executing a project team. Sometimes, however, the challenge comes in the middle of the execution, when people are too loyal to their R&R and become very assertive. This is a common problem, especially when you have a project team of people with different specialties. A designer might argue that feature A should be included from a user experience perspective, while a developer might say that implementing A as is would drive up the development schedule and difficulty too much.

Validate and execute product ideas

And they don’t back down from their claims. To avoid this confusion, it’s important for product managers to clearly define each person’s role early on in the project, and to build consensus by defining the decision-making priorities for our product in advance. For example, we can define the following upfront.

As a product manager, it’s your job to make sure your product is valuable, usable, and implementable for your customers.
Development is important, but for our product, UX design is the number one decision.
Developers think in terms of implementation, but users use and evaluate products based on their feelings and experiences.
Developers are not UX design experts. Developers are focused on developing for a given UX.
Product ideas are validated with potential customers.
We need to have a working prototype so we can test our ideas with potential customers.
Product managers should take overall responsibility for identifying the scope of the minimum functional product and minimizing the time and resources required.

DX projects are just as prone to failure as traditional IT projects. This means that if you have never worked on an IT project in an existing organization, it is difficult to understand the content, let alone have visibility into the middle of the process. That’s why it’s important for executives to delegate power to POs, even if they can’t check the content, and make sure that they hear the principles of the role and execution direction from the organizational management level mentioned earlier and follow them well.

Digital Transformation Organizational Structure: The Importance of a Self-Sufficient Organization

01/07/202412/05/2023 by DX Talk

Digital Transformation Organizational Structure: The Importance of a Self-Sufficient Organization. The seventh part of Acquiring and Organizing Talent to Drive Digital Transformation (DX) Success explores strategies for effectively organizing and managing a dedicated digital transformation (DX) team. Learn the importance of an end-to-end organizational structure and HR strategy, and discover how to support your organization for DX project success.

Basic considerations for building a digital transformation organizational structure

Now that you have an organization dedicated to digital transformation (DX and DT) and have someone working on it, the next question is how to organize it. If you have 8 people or less, you can organize them into a team without much thought. However, if you have more than eight people, or three or four people in different roles, you’ll need to think a bit more. How you organize your team has a lot to do with how fast you can get DX up and running.

Job-centric vs. project-centric: How digital transformation organizations should be structured

Even when a company has only 30 members, executives are often faced with the question of how to organize. Most companies have two main types of organizations. One is a functional organization. For example, a development team, a planning team, a design team, etc. In IT, this is especially preferred because people learn and grow by working with their peers. Functional organization gives employees a sense of security and helps them improve their skills.

Another form of organization is teaming up by project or business unit. Instead of being organized by job function, people with different roles are brought together to work on a project or business with a common goal. This type of organization has the advantage of being able to execute quickly because the common goal is clear. Instead, the leader of the team needs to have an understanding of all job functions. And because members aren’t working with people in similar roles to their own, they may not have a sense of belonging and may feel insecure about their personal development.

The right end-to-end organizational structure for your digital transformation organization

So what kind of organization is right for digital transformation? Unless you’re a large enterprise that can afford a large team to handle your digital transformation, I recommend a single, purpose-driven team, which means you’ll want to have an end-to-end organization where someone on the team is responsible for DX execution from start to finish. This may sound like a no-brainer, but you need to be aligned early on, with clear goals and a limited timeframe. This is why it’s good to have an organization that is accountable for the beginning and end of a task. That’s not to say you should create an IT-only organization.

If you’re planning DX for your existing core business, you’ll need to bring key people from that side of the business into the DX organization as well. For example, when Starbucks launched a new business offering mobile experiences like Siren Order, they had service planners, developers, and designers that were part of the IT staff, but they also had people from the retail organization that were transitioned into the new organization. This means that you need to have a true end-to-end organization, and you need to be able to pull in and out of the organization as you see fit.

This is similar to running a separate startup or internal venture. You might think that you can create a virtual organization in the form of a task or project team, but the reality is that running a DX is a series of decisions, just like running a successful startup. That’s why it’s important to have clearer organizational goals and approval lines. It is difficult to achieve the desired level of DX results by simply moving from one place to another like an enemy.

HR strategy for running a complete digital transformation organization

Once you’ve made the decision to create a complete, end-to-end organization, the next step is to establish the basic principles by which it will operate. It is fundamental to give the head of the organization maximum authority and responsibility, and to establish early on the attitudes and philosophies that individuals in the end-to-end organization should have as new team members.

To this end, I would like to suggest the following HR practices: For the first three years, I recommend that the organization’s evaluation method be absolute rather than relative. Relative evaluation has its advantages, but in a DX organization with a clear direction, it is important to create a sense of shared goals among employees. It sends the message that if you do your best work, you’ll get a good evaluation. Absolute appraisals help to focus all work towards the organization’s common goals, rather than individual competition.

When you have a cross-functional team in an organization, there are bound to be some roles that are more internally vocal than others. This can vary from company to company or depending on the person in charge of the organization. This can lead to developers giving various opinions on planning and business instead of focusing on development, designers ignoring developers’ opinions, and so on.

In order to avoid these mistakes, it is important to clearly declare the roles and responsibilities of each job from the beginning of the organization and make sure that they are recognized by each other. In other words, it is important to create a culture that recognizes and trusts the skills of the best professionals. There should be a consensus that each person should be expected to make the decisions necessary to execute their job.

Effective organizational management to support your digital transformation organization

Finally, we’re talking about the support organizations that will help your DX organization. For example, legal, finance, accounting, and so on. Leaving these support organizations to execute according to their existing processes can lead to frequent changes in personnel, or people with no IT understanding trying to dictate the DX project with their own internal management rules. To avoid this inefficiency, executives should also consider assigning a dedicated DX person in the support organization.

Some of the aforementioned directions can be quite uncomfortable from a traditional HR perspective. However, since DX is all about breaking the mold and creating new efficiencies, it’s important to explain this to existing employees and create a culture where both organizations understand each other.

Digital transformation workforce: need to be treated according to IT industry standards

01/07/202412/04/2023 by DX Talk

Digital transformation workforce: need to be treated according to IT industry standards. The sixth part of Acquiring and Organizing Talent to Drive Digital Transformation (DX) Success explores the importance of treating members of a dedicated digital transformation (DX, DT) organization in line with IT industry standards. Examines the competitive landscape of the domestic and international IT labor market and the strategies needed to recruit DX talent.

Up-and-coming careers in IT and the demand for digital transformation talent

Most of the jobs in the top 10 of Glassdoor’s list of the 50 hottest jobs of 2020 are in the IT field. The list was based on salary, job satisfaction, and job placement rates, and the top 10 jobs include front-end engineer, JAVA developer, data scientist (AI modeler), product manager, DevOps engineer, data engineer, and software engineer, all in the IT field.

The current state of domestic and international IT talent competition

In fact, these are the people who are essential to digital transformation. The domestic situation is not much different. Recently, the battle for IT talent among Korea’s top IT companies, such as Naver, Kakao, Delivery Nation, Coupang, and TOS, has been fierce enough to resemble a war. They are competing fiercely to recruit A-level developers with the best treatment in the industry, as well as large signing bonuses (incentives given in advance upon signing a work contract), various other welfare benefits, and stock options. This competition for talent is only getting more intense.

The importance of treating your digital transformation workforce right

The reason for the lengthy description of the job market in the IT industry is that the talent for digital transformation falls into the above categories and is competing for talent with the big names. One of the first things that comes up internally when you’re building an organization to execute DX from a non-IT perspective is the treatment of new hires. This is not only true for large organizations, but also for small and mid-sized companies.

If you’re a small startup, you have the flexibility to negotiate with the managing director and make decisions based on individual capabilities, but if you’re a larger company, you’re limited by the size of your workforce, and you can’t treat people differently for different jobs. However, the bottom line is that it is important for DX employees to align their treatment standards with the company’s existing treatment and the IT industry in which they work. This will ensure organizational continuity.

Digital transformation workforce: need to be treated according to IT industry standards

Key factors to consider in digital transformation staffing

Beyond the need to align average pay with market standards, there’s something else to consider when hiring new talent. In IT, the difference in productivity between an A-player and a C-player is more than double. So, if you can, it’s better to hire one A-player, even at a higher salary, than two C-players. Of course, as your organization grows, it’s not practical to keep everyone at A-level talent.

But in the early days of building a new organization, it’s a good idea to keep it that way. And one more thing, what companies like Google, Netflix, and Amazon in the US have in common is that more people want to work for them because they know that the people they work with next to them are A-listers and they want to work with them and compete with them. This can also be an important factor in driving loyalty to the company. This is something that we need to think about when we’re recruiting talent.

Digital transformation workforce: Strategies for reference checks and turnover in the IT workforce

When conducting a recruitment interview, it is difficult for managers or interviewers to accurately assess a person’s capabilities based on a short interview time. However, people in IT jobs are relatively easy to evaluate because it is easy to check references and see their own apps, services, and data modeling. When checking references, it is possible to get two or three or more external people instead of just one.

In recent years, the IT industry has seen a lot of competition for talent, and it’s not uncommon to see people jump from one job to another in the middle of a project for a higher salary. It’s not uncommon to see people leaving for double their previous salary. Not all employees decide to change jobs simply because of salary. However, it’s important for executives and managers to realize that many workers are getting offers from more places than they realize. For non-IT organizations, the loss of hard-earned talent can be devastating. Don’t overlook the fact that digital transformation is more likely to be an individual effort than an organizational effort in the short term.