Summary of activities - AWS Prescriptive Guidance

Summary of activities

As we discussed earlier in this guide, the primary business objectives to set the foundation for this domain are the alignment of critical organizational leaders and commitment of executive sponsorship, the mobilization of migration resources, and envisioning the organization’s future state. A number of key activities can facilitate, support, and even accelerate the achievement of these business outcomes by preparing and enabling the people in the organization who will be impacted by the business transformation.

Enterprises almost always have a multitude of competing priorities, even within their cloud strategy. Additionally, there is often an expectation that a single executive sponsor can produce the intended business outcomes. In reality, the impact of cloud adoption on an organization is far-reaching and requires cross-functional leadership and alignment as well as clear prioritization.

In the Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) phase of adoption, you lay the foundation; get the right leaders in place; pull together a capable team that can deliver a body of work (like migrating an application to AWS, or standing up a new environment); envision what the future will look like culturally, organizationally, and for internal and external customers; and start to learn and demonstrate, through action, what success looks like. This cross-functional set of leaders, who may later become part of a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) team, should strive to achieve alignment across the organization and define value-add within their own teams, drive organizational urgency and prioritization of cloud adoption, and envision the future state of the organization. Some questions that you will answer at this stage are:

  • How will our culture change or stay the same?

  • How will we operate differently than we do today?

  • Who will our internal customers be, and how will we engage them to drive better outcomes for external customers?

  • How will our teams look compared to today? Will they operate in a “you build it, you run it; you run it, you build it” model? If so, what skills and capabilities will that require for each team to be self-sufficient? What attitudes and behaviors will that require?

  • How will leaders help managers and teams adopt this new way of operating and delivering results to customers?

  • How will our teams adopt a product-based operating model, if that’s different from how the organization has historically operated?

This stage is the opportunity to learn and grow through experience before taking the migration project to the next level.

Nothing is more effective and builds momentum faster than the opportunity to learn by doing. We recommend providing that opportunity through a number of different avenues, which we will outline in greater detail in the next section. Begin by pulling together a group of cross-functional leaders, making decisions about what the future will look like for the people in the organization, mobilizing an initial implementation team and an initial body of work to gain the necessary insight and learnings, and demonstrating results that can be emulated and scaled. These are the first steps to setting the foundation for future state culture, change, and leadership.

The next section provides guidance on how you get there, by leveraging a framework of activities that can be customized to your organization’s specific needs and that can accelerate your employees’ adoption of a new way of operating in a cloud environment. After all, it’s not possible to realize the value and promise of the cloud unless the people in your organization embrace the future state and their role in it.