Why every transformation leader should adopt Everest's four-part framework for building a healthy pipeline

Alabhya Pranay 

An organization’s digital transformation journey comes with many challenges – managing change, aligning stakeholders, and finding the right skills, to name a few. But according to Everest Group, the #1 blocker to achieving transformation at scale is identifying and sustaining a pipeline of opportunities.

It’s not surprising. Life is filled with many examples where the biggest challenge to improvement is knowing where to focus and why. It’s akin to setting personal fitness goals, investing in a gym membership, but not knowing what equipment or exercises will help you.

Whether it’s improving your health or improving legacy operations, ‘transformation’ happens at greater speed with greater results when you have a clear roadmap for success. Doing so requires a structured approach and the right tools to help you chart your path.

And luckily, for any organization looking to take their process transformation programs to the next level, Everest Group just released a proven way to turn the #1 blocker to success into a catalyst for scale and value.

The solution? A four-step, technology-driven approach to building a “healthy pipeline” that accelerates the value and reach of your initiatives.

Each step feeds the next and helps create a continuous cycle of opportunity discovery, prioritization, and value realization.

Let’s dig into each and why they are critical to success:

Step 1: Scaled discovery of as-is processes (because you can’t fix what you don’t know)

The first step is key to getting a complete and accurate view of how work gets done today. This removes guesswork and provides a fact-based way to identify your biggest improvement opportunities.

Despite the adoption of enterprise apps like SAP and CRM, 70% of employee effort is spent in communication, productivity, and legacy apps. Make sure your discovery covers all apps and encompasses the end-user’s perspective!

Step 2: Comprehensive identification of transformation opportunities (because there is no silver bullet for improving legacy processes)

The second step unifies change levers in a sequenced way for greater and sustained value. This includes integrating automation, process clean up, user training and more to drive real transformation.

Don’t automate a broken process! 50% of potential value can come from cleaning up a process before automating it.

Step 3: Holistic view into the ROI (because cost savings is only one part of the equation)

The third step is about prioritizing change efforts based on cost impact as well as operational and strategic KPIs. This aligns initiatives with broader organizational objectives and drives exec buy-in.

Everest’s research says top-line growth and enhanced customer experience are the top strategic drivers of digital adoption in operations.

Step 4: Continuous monitoring of ongoing initiatives for feedback (because if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it)

The fourth step is to use ongoing performance data to validate the impact of projects and identify additional improvement opportunities. This helps build momentum and continuously refine the transformation roadmap.

  • Ask yourself: Are you able to validate impact of transformation with a reliable ‘before vs after’ view?
  • Do you have an accurate way to baseline and measure improvements?

Get a closer look at Everest’s framework

Think a healthy pipeline is what you need to scale your transformation program? Learn more about each aspect in Everest’s whitepaper and understand why organizations like the pharma multinational Bayer are using hybrid process mining to achieve success.

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