As an IT leader, you understand a successful cloud transformation positions IT as a business enabler, rather than a curator of infrastructure. Adopting the cloud is more than simply moving your on-prem instance to a provider’s servers and going on with business as usual. The flexibility, scalability, and security of the cloud allows businesses to deliver value in ways that were not dreamed of outside of science fiction novels in earlier generations. Cloud transformation is about the whole system – people, processes, data, and tools. When cloud transformation is done right, it’s a true game changer. Getting it right requires you to focus on your people, not just technology enabling them. Here are tips to help you do that.

Connect the Dots

Whether you’re focused on adopting the cloud, modernizing your systems, or getting more from your data, helping your business solve problems and overcome challenges are the driving forces. People will need to work differently to achieve your desired results. If you’ve tried to change your own habits – working out, reading more, going to bed earlier – you know that influencing human behavior isn’t easy. To help people navigate these changes and thrive, it’s especially important to connect these dots:

• How the solution will help employees solve problems and overcome challenges they face in their day to day work.
• What people will need to do differently and what support will be available to help them do that.

Start with the Home Team, But Don’t End There

The first place to start is with the IT teams. Whether the solution includes provisioning firewalls to migrate an on-prem intranet to SharePoint Online, modernizing millions of lines of COBOL code and migrating subsystems into Microsoft Azure, harnessing cloud-native services and DevOps practices, unleashing data intelligence through cloud-based outage tracking systems that incorporate Power BI, or automating workflows with Power Apps, people from different IT teams will need to work together to get the right solutions in place. This means communication and collaboration across IT teams, as well as within teams, is more important than ever.

Ensuring that all your business’ IT teams understand how they are an important part of the solution and ensuring they have access to the support they need to perform successfully are critical tasks. However, teams outside of IT are also likely to be impacted, whether it’s HR needing to update policies or documentation as a result of the new tools, or the entire company’s workforce using new communication and collaboration tools.

Ensure You Have a Complete Solution

Take a closer look at whose work will be impacted, what the areas of impact are, and the likely degree of impact. This will help you manage risk by ensuring you have a complete solution and that you can wisely deploy resources. If you have accelerated the deployment of cloud-based collaboration tools in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and are proceeding with immediate implementation of tooling, you can use this guidance to determine the gaps in a complete solution and what’s needed to close the loop. Here are three questions to help you identify the impact that your solution needs to address:

Step 1 – Whose day to day work is impacted?

• IT Teams
• Employees
• Business Units
• Customers
• Other Stakeholders

Step 2 – What are the areas impacted?

• Roles
• Processes
• Tools
• Actions/Work behaviors
• Mindsets/views

Step 3 – What is the level of impact on the day to day work?

• Low – Small change in one or two areas
• Medium – Medium change in one area or multiple areas impacted
• High – Significant change in one or more areas or small change but significant consequences if the change is not adopted well

The greater the level of impact, the more important it is to have enough support in place. How much support is enough? To answer that, take a closer look at the likely obstacles, then put support in place to clear the path.

Anticipate Obstacles and Proactively Clear the Path

With the impact clear, it’s time to anticipate obstacles that will be faced as people adopt the new roles, processes, tools, actions/work behaviors or mindsets/views they need for successful results to be achieved.

For example, let’s say your company is migrating to a central repository and communication platform. Employees will benefit from a more seamless work experience across devices and be able to access on-demand resources, get answers to their questions, and resolve issues faster. Employees will need to know how to find the information they need in a timely manner, and they will need to know whether to use e-mail, instant messaging, or post to a discussion channel for their specific business scenarios.

Most obstacles fall into one of four categories:

• Knowing: Do those impacted know what is changing and why they are an important part of the solution?
• Caring: Do they care about the problems the new tool, system or processes will help solve?
• Norming: Do they know what is expected of them? Does their leadership (and other influencers) demonstrate through consistent words and actions that this is important?
• Performing: Can they do what is expected of them? How will they get feedback? Are incentives aligned with the desired performance? Are there any new challenges that they are likely to face and have these been accounted for?

A complete solution anticipates these challenges and proactively builds in support by considering the experiences people have and the support they need specific to the business scenarios they are engaged in on a regular basis.

Conclusion

Wherever you are on your cloud transformation journey, make sure you are considering the experiences and support that people need to have in order to successfully navigate changes in roles, processes, and tooling to thrive. The sooner people start to thrive, the sooner your company gets its ROI with business problems solved and challenges overcome. Ultimately, a complete cloud transformation solution must be tech-fueled, but people-focused.