I remember the phrase “you are born once but live you live every day” which can be extended to digital transformation “You implement it once but it will help you always”. Digital transformation is a big journey for any organization as it has the calibre to change the fundamental way of working of an organization. It can help an organization better serve the needs of the clients or customers, understand their employees and to transform the organization into a more efficient and successful one. Take the example of insurance group BUPA who transformed its business strategies focusing more on digital marketing and focusing on highly personalized acquisition and retention of customers.

If you ask any executive what is the first priority of their business? They would immediately say serving the needs and improving the overall experience of their clients. But why? Because every organization has to deliver beyond customer expectations to be sustainable in the dynamic environment and to save itself from being killed by the disruptive innovations. Every new change in an organization go through certain well-defined processes and same is the case with digital projects and better the organization is at handling those activities or processes, better would be the end results the organization is seeking for. Digital transformations projects are more challenging than conventional projects making project management capabilities more important.

Project management is nothing but managing the organization resources like skills, tools, techniques effectively to meet the project requirements in the allocated budget and meeting all the constraints. It brings discipline, standardised approaches, and offers a highly effective structure to identify potential risks, issues in advance and thereby achieving higher performance and increasing the chances of success. Organizations must be able to continue delivering the value and experiences customers demand and expect while implementing new digital initiatives. Leveraging digital technologies is more than just good business—it’s crucial to staying relevant and profitable. But to achieve any of the above results companies has to build capabilities in project management as it helps companies to respond quickly to changing market conditions and controlling the digital spending in collaboration with the project stakeholders. It also helps companies in identifying potential issues well in advance and thereby reducing the project waste.

Digital transformation involves a fundamental rethinking and restructuring of IT function in an organization. It considers technology not as a back-office support role but as a key differentiator in how business should compete. Any organization willing to undertake digital transformation has to re-evaluate how they work and how digital can help reshape the existing business and for this all the goals of the organization have to be aligned with digital strategy and alignment of business units, avoiding any possible integration difficulties within the organization can be effectively handled with project management techniques. Airbnb in the tourist market is the best example of leveraging project management while going Digital. I believe Airbnb success is attributed to four major factors process, flexibility, clear communication, Feedback (Listening to communication). Project management capabilities include all of these and thus companies can leverage their project management skills in ensuring that they work on digital projects with clear vision, modular teams,  well-defined metrics to measure the goals, and scraping the project when necessary i.e. flexibility.

Digital transformations projects are high budget projects which organizations have to successfully complete. Every digital transformation project involves a greater risk in comparison to other core projects because of uncertainty, lack of digital skills, and lack of support from investors. Companies can leverage project management capabilities in examining the risk-reward of each such project to evaluate the best way to invest the company capital and human skills. Good project management capabilities can help companies to stop investing money in digital projects that may fail in future, thus ensuring that company available resources are used in the best efficient way.

Project Management centrally involves around customer values and user-centred design thus ensuring that any transformation is it our business or client business should ensure customer satisfaction and delight. Project management, when applied to digital transformation can help the organizations in prioritizing the most-important requirements as per the customer needs.  Agile a method of project management is characterised by the division of work into small phases of cycles so that frequent assessment of the plans can be done by the management. Companies can leverage agility to digital transformation and enjoy benefits like flexibility, continuous improvement, and cost control, reduction in risks, increased communication and engagement with clients and within the organization, increased transparency, and high quality of the end software or services. In essence, the agile approach to digital transformation can help companies in accelerating the speed of digital transformation while keeping core business functions working smoothly.

Microsoft Azure offered by Microsoft is a cloud-based project management platform providing companies multiple services such as software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), tools, and frameworks. For e.g. Bentley Systems implemented Azure-based services extending their already existing ProjectWise edition for enhancing the deliveries of project

Practice self-disruption: companies need to practice self-disruption enabling every employee to think beyond traditional approaches of doing businesses. Companies having good project management capabilities has the edge over competitors in practising self-disruption and can leverage it. The best example is Alphabet, It has divided itself into sub-bets such as Google, X lab, Nest etc. because of their unique capabilities in project and product management. Companies can leverage project management capabilities in protecting its core businesses by

Finally, the digital transformation within an organization includes three pillars which are the strategy, Information technology, and Business. Companies should leverage the project management skills to transform all the three pillars and ensuring that information technology, the core business and the strategy of the company are all well aligned keeping the dynamics of industry and customer expectations in mind.