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You must strengthen the organization's ability to reliably produce consumer satisfaction through collaborative processes to meet the high-velocity objectives of digital transformation.

Traditionally, organizations that want to improve collaboration, people, and teams have relied on publicly available IT frameworks and models. However, simply defining, documenting, and automating your processes is insufficient.

You must create efficient, accountable, and flexible governance and ownership roles for shared organizational processes to be sustainable and developed over time. You'll need a common vision, a collective community, efficient teaming models, and a shared tooling strategy to make these work.

Here are five fundamental skills that can help cultivate and maintain any digital transformation practice or common purpose through diverse value chains involving internal and external service organizations.

1. Leadership: Developing systems thinking and a clear sense of mission

Your actions and decisions represent the world you've grown up in, which involves both positive and negative traits exhibited by current and previous organizational leaders.

An organization's culture, ethics, concentration, motivation, direction, and willingness to collaborate are largely determined by the tone at the top. Organizational culture is either deliberately programmed or evolves haphazardly as a result of employees' values and experiences.

An organization's outcomes are inextricably related to its community, while the culture's connection to the organization's values and experiences represents its leadership.

Consequently, an organization's ability to develop successful process governance roles is directly linked to how its representatives communicate with their colleagues and teams. Senior leaders who visibly collaborate around shared goals and show their dedication can better develop this position and build coherence and a common strategy across teams.

2. Culture: Moving from siloed relationships to integrated relationships with mutual objectives.

Natural boundaries exist in all human cultures and organizations where our definition of "us" ends, and we consider all others as "them." Although this is natural, difficulties can occur when our sense of self-identification is too small. Systems thinking focuses on expressing the same values, beliefs, behaviors, and job prioritization to accomplish shared goals.

When the sense of "us" is narrow and constrained, establishing effective process governance mechanisms that span several teams is nearly impossible. Building an agreement for mutual and popular practices within your silo isn't difficult, but due to cultural limitations, incorporating a common practice into other communities in a highly siloed society is nearly impossible.

3. Structure: Getting things going by forming cross-functional teams

Vertically oriented frameworks and management processes are often built on design concepts from the turn of the century, prioritizing role specialization. While it is essential to develop a localized specialization, it can also hinder cross-functional collaboration.

Leaders must find ways to improve teamwork, interaction, and creativity across teams using shared processes and resources in today's fast-paced, increasingly automated business climate, which necessitates increased speed to market and faster innovation.

For both growth and support, conventional top-down organizational frameworks are experimenting with product-oriented cross-functional teams. Many verticals that have followed lean manufacturing practices have had these ideas in place for decades.

Cross-functional teamwork is not a novel phenomenon. Forming a temporary teaming framework that shares principles, objectives, expectations, and outcome-based steps for which they are collectively accountable are the first step in developing a project team of participants with specializations.

4. Performance: Moving away from activity-based assessments and toward mutual outcomes

Rather than individual activity measures, highly effective teams use shared outcome-based measures.

What is measured matters, and existing performance management processes in many organizations are related to vertical organizational frameworks. Person behavior versus shared process or product results are used to evaluate teams and individuals.

On the other hand, traditional performance measurement systems frequently contradict the goal of establishing shared process goals. This has a negative impact on process governance roles; in the end, people pay attention to how they are judged.

5. Automation: Moving away from best-of-breed point solutions and toward integrated suites.

The desire to use shared tools for shared processes is the final prerequisite for effective process governance. The previous four enablers are required to achieve this goal.

The likelihood of adopting shared tools is very low unless your organization's leadership, culture, team structure, and measurement systems are all aligned around systems thinking and shared processes. When it comes to IT tool acquisition, most companies preach integrated solutions to their customers but prefer best-of-breed point solutions over integrated suites.

Leadership and culture play a role in the use of shared tools. Leaders and teams must first answer the following five questions before sharing tools to address this.

Are they able to:

1. Agree to agree to agree? (Think in systems rather than silos.)

2. Agree on one method of doing something? (Reduce the amount of variation and complexity.)

3. Agree to concentrate on simplifying how this should be accomplished? (Pay special attention to value-added activities and waste reduction.)

4. Agree to collaborate using only one tool? (Move each category to a common tool to improve collaboration and lower technical debt.)

5. Agree to go with an integrated solution instead of a best-of-breed point solution? (By integrating systems, you can help automate delivery pipelines.)

Effective processes are required for digital transformation.

Your organization must establish effective process governance to move from a reactive and low maturity state to an improved ability to deliver value consistently and reliably. To support your organization's goals, ownership roles must define, deploy, sustain, and improve those processes.

The five critical foundational enablers described above are required for these roles to fulfill their mandate. And most organizations still have a lot of work to do.