Point 1. Mobilize Team
Mobilize Team is designed to build a structure and to identify measures of success and governance around change acceleration efforts and activities. This area contains eight subpoints:
1.1 Develop change acceleration charter
1.4 Establish project team structure
1.5 Define project goals and objectives
1.1 Develop change acceleration charter
What is it?
A formal Change Acceleration Charter document is intended to build leadership alignment and buy-in to the change acceleration scope of work from the onset of the cloud program. This document identifies the cloud program team’s dependencies on other areas, as well as key stakeholders. The change acceleration charter includes:
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A review process for change acceleration deliverables
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A definition of stakeholder responsibilities related to change acceleration activities
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A definition of change acceleration metrics and reporting requirements
Why is it valuable?
The Change Acceleration Charter is purposeful, thoughtful, and structured. It delivers timely solutions and tactics to maximize speed, optimize adoption, and mitigate organizational risk. A cloud program inevitably includes risks that might cause issues or derailments. This document anticipates and addresses these issues proactively by assigning deliverables, stakeholder roles and responsibilities, metrics, and reporting.
When do you use it?
As the cloud program starts up, coordinate and gather input from various groups:
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Meet with program leaders to gather information about business case, scope, timeline, milestones, level of effort, and information about key stakeholder meetings.
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Meet with the executive sponsor to gather information about the cloud value vision and desired business outcomes, and to confirm the level of active and visible sponsorship.
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Meet with workstream leads to gather information about scope, timing of critical deliverables and events, and expectations for interaction with the change acceleration team.
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Meet with internal groups (as applicable) such as change management, corporate or strategic communications, employee engagement, human resources, and training (or learning and development) to understand the level of support they will dedicate to the cloud program, and any expectations for change acceleration reports that you will need to provide to them.
This input helps confirm the level of change acceleration support and involvement required. Scheduling a meeting to discuss these topics will help you establish initial relationships with stakeholders.
1.2 Analyze value drivers
What is it?
Value driver analysis is an important foundation for strategic planning and helps management sort through their operations to define critical strategic levers. This analysis presents an approach to increasing performance that will forge stronger links between operating performance measures and shareholder value creation. Value drivers can be categorized as growth drivers, efficiency drivers, or financial drivers. Companies tend to create paths to value creation by investing in growth opportunities, investing in operating efficiency, divesting value-destroying activities, and reducing capital costs.
Why is it valuable?
Oftentimes, organizations unintentionally reward managers for attaining performance measures that have little impact on value. To avoid this, organizations can identify key drivers of value creation and structure a performance measurement approach around them. Leaders can, in turn, focus their attention on activities that have the greatest impact on value.
When do you use it?
Use value driver analysis when you want to examine and define the specific paths to value creation by function and level within the organization. This will help managers focus their attention on factors that matter the most. Typically, managers have a solid knowledge of the variables that affect business performance, and they manage that list diligently. The problem is that the list of variables is often too long and might be prioritized against goals other than value creation. Value drivers should have a significant impact on value, and should be controllable.
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Value drivers that have a high impact on value and a high degree of management influence should be managed actively.
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Value drivers that have a high impact on value and a low degree of management influence should be reconfigured by changing the strategy.
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Value drivers that have a low impact on value and a high degree of management influence should be monitored.
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Value drivers that have a low impact on value and a low degree of management influence should be considered low priority.
1.3 Establish governance
What is it?
Governance secures integrated alignment with executives, key stakeholders, the cloud program team, and the change acceleration team. It also defines ownership, decision rights, issue management, and the escalation process for change acceleration activities.
Why is it valuable?
A program that establishes a clear structure and governance has a higher probability of success than one that doesn’t establish structure or governance. This is because decisions and ownership around decision-making rights can often be a major factor in delaying cloud programs. Governance establishes decision-making authorities and can provide guidance around two-way door decisions (decisions that can be made quickly with low risk and can be easily reversed), and one-way door decisions (decisions that require more thought and contemplation, because they cannot be easy reversed).
When do you use it?
Use governance to enable clear decisive leadership and accountability of the change acceleration program, provide quality assurance and a path to escalate issues and risks, specify a decision rights framework for the program, align the workstream structure to the existing project, program, and organization-wide governance structure, and establish a cadence of meetings and scrum ceremonies that map to the rest of the program rhythm and reporting mechanisms.
1.4 Establish project team structure
What is it?
Project team structures power the cloud program. Cloud migrations and transformations require change acceleration expertise to address the non-technical aspects of the program. Additionally, many cloud programs determine that they will establish a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to lead their company through organizational and business transitions over the course of the migration effort or transformation. When this structure is in place, the change acceleration team, which is within the CCoE, is responsible for identifying organizational changes, change impacts, role changes, communications, and training requirements, and for securing executive sponsorship.
Why is it valuable?
As with every other aspect of your program, staffing your change acceleration team with dedicated, accountable, experienced resources helps you invest in a smoother transition to the cloud. Delays and challenges in a company’s cloud adoption journey are often caused by poor decision making, communication issues, or lack of cross-functional leadership alignment. Mitigating risk in these areas while propelling the culture forward can make a significant difference in speed to adoption.
When do you use it?
Staff your team with key roles that focus on change acceleration at the beginning of the program. Evaluate staffing levels on an ongoing basis to determine whether they should be scaled up or down in connection with the program’s scope and timeline. Here are some example key roles and responsibilities in the project team:
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People transformation executive advisor: Engages with the executive program sponsor and other IT and business leaders who are responsible for the migration or transformation (for example, CIO, CTO, cloud program director, CCoE leader).
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Change acceleration lead: Manages all aspects of the change acceleration team, deliverables, and timelines at the program level. Works with customer workstream counterpart, program manager, cloud program director, CCoE leader, and other program workstream leads.
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Executive change acceleration oversight and program oversight roles: Collaborate at all levels to drive project strategy and successful implementation with responsibility for quality assurance.
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Organizational readiness and communications lead: Establishes the communication strategy and implements the communication plan; works with the customer communications lead and other stakeholders such as business leads and application owners, as required.
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Training lead: Designs and develops the training strategy and plan. Works in collaboration with the customer learning and development or training lead to determine how to best advertise training, target users for training courses, handle training logistics, and roll out training within the customer’s environment.
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Specialty subject matter experts (as needed): Focus on variable aspects of the program such as culture analysis, diversity and inclusion, and strategic workforce planning.
These roles set the foundation of the change acceleration team, and additional resources can be added to the team as the scope of the cloud migration or transformation increases, changes, or expands globally.
1.5 Define project goals and objectives
What is it?
Cloud migration or transformation goals and objectives originate in the discovery phase and are refined during the Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA) and the Migration Readiness Planning (MRP) efforts. The change acceleration team aligns its activities against those goals and objectives, and embeds them in the strategy. Goals and objectives are based on the business case, customer interviews, migration team meetings, and MRA and MRP findings.
Why is it valuable?
Including the change acceleration team in assessment and planning sessions builds alignment among the people, process, and technology aspects of migrating and modernizing applications and workloads on AWS. The team can additionally help focus on the design and implementation of the CCoE, the transition of a hybrid operations model to CCoE, and the creation of new processes and procedures as the journey to the cloud evolves.
When do you use it?
Use project goals and objectives to motivate, monitor, and measure progress on the cloud adoption journey. First understand which goals have already been established. Then work to establish new goals that are focused and simple. If the goal isn’t easily understood, it’s probably not the right goal. Build metrics and measurement mechanisms to update business leaders on the progress against these goals, and forecast business scenarios based on new implications. Consider the need to meet tactical targets and to manage the business strategically. Consider using SMART criteria for goals:
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S – Specific; has an observable outcome
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M – Measurable; you can quantify or indicate progress on the outcome
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A – Achievable; the outcome is feasible
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R – Realistic; aligns with or supports other goals or strategic initiatives
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T – Time-bound; has a target date
1.6 Establish future state
What is it?
A cloud migration or transformation future state identifies the vision and potential value that can be realized from the cloud solution. Future state is derived from organizational assessment outputs. It represents a visual alignment of your organization’s culture, structure, people, technology, and process with the new, cloud-centric ways of working.
When you model the future state, consider describing changes to the following components
of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework
(AWS CAF)
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Culture evolution: Evaluate, incrementally evolve, and codify organizational culture with digital transformation aspirations.
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Transformational leadership: Strengthen leadership capability and mobilize leaders to drive transformational change.
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Cloud fluency: Build digital acumen to confidently and effectively leverage the cloud to accelerate business outcomes.
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Workforce transformation: Enable talent and modernize roles to attract, develop, and retain a digitally fluent and high-performing workforce.
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Change acceleration: Accelerate the adoption of the new ways of working by applying a programmatic change acceleration framework.
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Organizational design: Assess and evolve organizational design for alignment with the new cloud ways of working.
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Organizational alignment: Establish ongoing partnership between organizational structures, business operations, talent, and culture.
Why is it valuable?
The future state informs the change acceleration approach you will take to transform your people, skills, and organization. Therefore, it requires some detailed analysis to be beneficial. Analysis techniques that can guide the definition of the future state include decision analysis, process analysis, business capability analysis, feature decomposition, prototyping, and product road mapping. Keep in mind that the characteristics of the application portfolio will affect the flexibility of the future state operating model.
When do you use it?
Use a future state approach to intentionally change the way your company works, and to determine how people drive the business strategy. This might result in drastic changes such as outsourcing, insourcing, or hiring a managed service to deliver aspects of your business. To make these types of decisions around the future state, involve participants who have diverse experiences or come from different professions to encourage innovation. Many companies benefit from identifying a network of change agents that represent a footprint of the impacted user base (functions, geographies, roles, and so on) of the cloud migration or transformation. A change agent is someone who is knowledgeable, authentic, and credible, and has influence, with or without formal authority, within their network. Additionally, think about organizational alignment and establish ongoing partnerships within organizational structures, business operations, talent, and culture. The future state is likely to evolve with your cloud adoption journey and needs to stay flexible. Therefore, define one or more interim states that can reasonably be achieved during the transition, and assess progress towards the desired future state on a regular (quarterly or bi-annual) basis.
1.7 Define business metrics
What is it?
Change acceleration metrics are performance measures that monitor and track how the people in your organization are transitioning through the required process and technology changes, migrations, and adoption of the cloud. Metrics might be both qualitative and quantitative, and can include both lagging indicators and leading indicators.
We recommend that you establish a change acceleration scorecard that tracks both qualitative measures (such as employee perceptions of the change and commitment to change) and quantitative measures (such as percentage of employees who attended scheduled training or heard about the change from their direct manager).
The change acceleration scorecard can focus on:
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Shared vision and strategy – Awareness of the program, messaging effectiveness, alignment of strategy and implementation, and level of impact of the program
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Sponsor engagement and alignment – Commitment, readiness, and prioritization of the program
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Business user engagement, awareness of resources, level of understanding of how the changes affect day-to-day work
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Skill competency and development – Training effectiveness, certifications achieved, and readiness to perform job tasks in the cloud
Why is it valuable?
In some projects, the technical, financial, and operational aspects of implementation or migration are closely tracked and monitored, whereas people-related issues are ignored or not diagnosed until they become problems. However, the high failure rate that characterizes project implementations and stalled migrations is tied more closely to the inability to manage people through change than to operational or financial factors. The following guiding principles are critical to migration success and business adoption:
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Leadership is informed and supportive of cloud migration implementation efforts.
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A clear, concise, well-articulated vision of the future and clarity around why it is important to change is understood.
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Stakeholders at all levels understand the change at the personal level. They are aware of what it will take to get there, and they take ownership of the change.
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All employees who are affected by the changes are fully aware, prepared, and receive timely and relevant training.
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Program information and support resources are available before and after migration.
These guiding principles, implemented by a robust change acceleration plan, help drive business user adoption and program success.
When do you use it?
Early in the cloud migration process it is important to confirm and establish change acceleration metrics that the program will track throughout its lifecycle. Measurements that can be used to track metrics include, but aren’t limited to, surveys, email receipts, email link usage, webpage views or clicks, evaluations, proficiency metrics, one-on-one meetings, participation in major program events, change agent feedback, and net promoter scores.
1.8 Define the budget
What is it?
A budget is the financial plan for a period of the program, such as one year, or the life
of the cloud transformation. For the change acceleration workstream, understanding the costs
related to supporting the people and organizational dimensions of a cloud migration or
transformation is key to controlling and implementing tasks and resources, and mitigating
risk. Although the budget can vary across change acceleration projects, we recommend that you
spend some portion of your budget on dedicated change management resources. There is a
relationship between sufficient resources and change management effectiveness. For more
information, see point 5 in Best
Practices in Change Management
Budget requirements can be categorized as follows:
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Change acceleration team resources (for example, change management, training, communications, technical writers, instructional designers)
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Material development (for example, communications, internal marketing, translations, printed materials)
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Skills and knowledge (for example, specialty training, instructor-led training, game days, workshops, simulations, certifications)
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Travel and events (for example, organizational readiness assessments, local site visits, instructor-led training, buzz events that drive interest and excitement)
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Software (for example, learning management systems, licenses for instructional design, enrollment fees, reporting fees, webinar conferencing tools)
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Hardware (for example, laptop leases or rentals for training)
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Facilities (for example, venue fees for offsite training, conference rooms, projectors, A/V equipment)
For budget-constrained organizations, many training and events that were traditionally conducted in person in a physical environment can also be delivered virtually and asynchronously to contain costs and provide more inclusivity to global team members.
Why is it valuable?
The change acceleration investment should be directly aligned with the magnitude of the change and the scope of anticipated activities. Understanding the scope gives you better visibility into forecasting and estimating costs.
Budgetary considerations must be given to change acceleration, organizational change management, organizational design, culture, communications, and training resources. Also consider expenses related to the development, deployment, and delivery of training and communication materials, software, hardware, and travel-related expenses.
When do you use it?
To support the creation of a robust budget, most change acceleration activities can be anticipated and planned in advance, with inputs from the Migration Readiness Assessment (MRA). Unplanned activities can surface throughout the cloud migration effort. These might require further investigation and assessment, and will require approval by the leadership team.
