Digital Transformation Game Plan

Chapter 5. Aligning Work to Measures

Aligning work is perhaps both the most logical and the most difficult step in a digital transformation. You now have your outcomes described in terms of customer value; you’ve defined the measures to ensure you are achieving the outcome; and you understand the importance of using a thin slice as the starting point. In this chapter, we describe the next step in which you cascade the measure into the work so that all of the work you do is for the improvement of the measure. We then look at how to adapt current work in-flight into this way of thinking so that you can prioritize work across your entire portfolio. The flow can be difficult to get your head around at the beginning, especially when surrounded by organizational constraints (we deal with those in Part II), but after you do, it becomes very simple and logical.

John Seddon perhaps explained this mental shift best when he described his Systems Thinking approach ofpurpose/measure/method as the alternative to the more traditional thinking of purpose/method/measure, where measures are the afterthought and largely describe completion rather than outcome achievement.¹ This way you are designing the work to succeed. It’s almost cheating!

So often today we see the opposite; most work is already in flight inside of functional units when the organizational level strategy is written. So you either need to restructure to get work done or find ways to squeeze it into the strategy “buckets” as a way ...