Avoiding the cliff edge: Why digital transformation should be agile

Naturally, every project does encounter problems. When you’ve meticulously planned and budgeted for everything, only for something to throw a spanner in the works, adapting to it can be slow, costly or just impossible.

"Whenever an issue appears that doesn’t fit in with that plan, the project is easily derailed. This situation is apparent to anybody who has watched the TV show Grand Designs: however well-planned the project is, it will always miss the deadline, often with expensive consequences.”

"People find it difficult to deal with change if they do not feel capable, are not motivated, and/or they do not see value in it. A lot of it is about how change is presented"

After all that, the email itself might be wrong too. It wouldn’t have been iterated and refined, because we spent all our time and effort on the system itself and forgot our original simple intent: just to get an important email to a customer.

Getting a person out of the waterfall mentality can be a challenge when they are so used to working in other ways, but can be done with regular encouragement and reminders of the process from the scrum team, and reinforcement of the benefits when they occur.

Because print is a one-and-done medium, managers are wary of making costly and potentially embarrassing errors. Digital doesn’t have that same level of finality. Online content can be changed almost instantaneously and infinitely.

Extensive due diligence, consideration and being conscious of quality is simply what works best for those bodies, but it often slows down the speed of the project as a whole.