People perspective: culture and change

The people perspective serves as a bridge between technology and business, accelerating the cloud journey to help organizations more rapidly evolve to a culture of continuous growth, learning, and where change becomes business-as-normal, with focus on culture, organizational structure, leadership, and workforce. This perspective comprises seven capabilities shown in the following figure. Common stakeholders include CIO, COO, CTO, cloud director, and cross-functional and enterprise-wide leaders.

AWS CAF People perspective capabilities

• Culture evolution – Evaluate, incrementally evolve, and codify organizational culture with digital transformation aspirations, and best practices for agility, autonomy, clarity, and scalability. To succeed in digital transformation, you’ll need to leverage your heritage and core values, while you incorporate new behaviors and mindsets that attract, retain, and empower a workforce that’s invested in continuously improving and innovating on behalf of your customers. Maintain a long-term focus, obsess over customers, and boldly innovate to meet their needs. Institute an organization-wide approach to recognizing behaviors and goals for all roles that help shape your desired culture. Consider rapid experimentation, agile methodologies, and cross-functional teams to drive ownership and autonomy, enable rapid decision making, and minimize the need for excessive approvals or bureaucracy.

• Transformational leadership – Strengthen your leadership capability and mobilize leaders to drive transformational change and enable outcome-focused, cross-functional decision making. To succeed with cloud transformation, your leaders must put as much focus on the people side of change as they do on technology, as without an effective blend of technical and business leadership, your transformation may slow down or stall. Gain active and visible executive sponsorship from both technology and business functions, who will make critical decisions on strategy, vision, scope, and resources, and take actions in communication, coalition building, and holding teams accountable for results.

  At both the executive and program levels, ensure that your business and technology leaders co-develop, co-lead, and co-deliver culture change strategies. Confirm that each layer of management delivers clear and consistent communications to align the organization on cloud value, priorities, and new behaviors. Consider evolving your cloud leadership function through a transformation office and/or a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) to evangelize and drive your transformation efforts with codified patterns for consistency and scalability. Incrementally evolve this function to meet your current needs as you progress through your transformation journey.

• Cloud fluency – Build digital acumen to confidently and effectively leverage cloud to accelerate business outcomes. The requirement for an exceptional workforce goes beyond adapting to a digital environment, and the greatest challenge is not the technology itself, but, rather, the ability to hire, develop, retain and motivate a talented, knowledgeable, proficient, and high-performing workforce.

  Given the rapid pace of technological innovation, address your overall training strategy as it relates to timing, tooling, and technology training, and then assess your existing cloud skills to develop a targetedtraining strategy. Implement a skills guild to help you generate excitement and build momentum for your transformation journey. Champion data literacy, to advance talent skills and knowledge in data analytics. Combine virtual, classroom, experiential and just-in-time training, leverage immersion days, and validate skills with formal certifications. Implement mentoring, coaching, shadowing, and job rotation programs. Set up communities of practice that own specific domains of interest. Reward individuals for sharing knowledge, and formalize processes for knowledge elicitation, peer review, and ongoing curation.

• Workforce transformation – Enable talent and modernize roles to attract, develop, and retain a digitally fluent high-performing and adaptable workforce that can autonomously drive key capabilities. To succeed in your cloud transformation, take a proactive approach to talent enablement planning beyond traditional HR to include C-suite leadership, and modernize your approaches to leadership, learning, rewards, inclusion, performance management, career mobility, and hiring.

  You will need a diverse and inclusive workforce with the appropriate mix of technical and non-technical skills. Identify gaps in roles and skills across your entire organization and develop a workforce strategy that will improve your organizational cloud capability. Leverage talent with digital skills, and those that are eager to learn, and make an example of them. Strategically consider the use of partners and managed service providers to temporarily or permanently augment your workforce.

  To attract new talent, build a strong employer brand by publicly promoting your digital vision and organizational culture, and use it in your recruiting strategy, social networking channels, and external marketing.

• Change acceleration – Accelerate adoption to the new ways of working by applying a programmatic change acceleration framework that identifies and minimizes impacts to people, culture, roles, and organization structure when moving from current to future state. Cloud transformation creates widespread changes across business and technology functions, and organizations that apply a programmatic end-to-end change process that is structured, integrated, and transparent achieve higher rates of success with value realization and adoption to the new ways of working.

  Customize and apply a change acceleration framework from project onset to enable organizational alignment, create a one shared enterprise reality, and reduce waste from the process. Align and mobilize cross-functional cloud leadership. Define what success looks like early in the journey. Envision the future by assessing your organization’s readiness for cloud through impact assessments. Identify key stakeholders, cross-organizational dependencies, key risks, and barriers to transformation. Develop a change acceleration strategy and roadmap that addresses risks and leverages strengths, comprised of leadership action plans, talent engagement, communications, training, and risk mitigation strategies.

  Engage the organization and enable it with new capabilities to increase acceptance to the new ways of working, learn new skills, and accelerate adoption. Track clearly defined metrics and celebrate early wins. Establish a change coalition to leverage existing cultural levers that can help you generate momentum. Make changes stick with continuous feedback mechanisms, and rewards and recognition programs.

• Organization design – Assess organization design for alignment with the new cloud ways of working, and evolve as you progress through your transformation journey. As you leverage cloud to digitally transform, ensure your organization design supports your core strategies for the business, its people, and operating environment. Establish a case for change, and assess if your organization design reflects the desired behaviors, roles, and culture that you have determined are key elements to your business success.

  Determine if the way your organization is structured and run, in terms of team formations, shift patterns, lines of reporting, decision-making procedures, and communication channels, still supports your desired business outcomes. Design the new model, and implement it by applying your change acceleration framework. Consider establishing a centralized team that is built to evolve over time, and which will initially facilitate and enable the transition to a cloud operating model that may be tailored to your vision. Consider trade-offs between centralized, decentralized, and distributed structures, and align your organization design to support the strategic value of your cloud workloads. Clarify the relationships between internal and external teams (using managed service providers).

• Organizational alignment – Establish ongoing partnership between organizational structures, business operations, processes, talent, and culture to enable enterprise rapid adaptation to market conditions, and the ability to capitalize on new opportunities. To augment cloud value realization, organizational alignment serves as a bridge between technology and business strategy so that technology changes are embraced by the business units who produce business outcomes.

  Prioritize business outcomes like operational resiliency, business agility, and product/service innovation. Enable talent to work autonomously, focus on key objectives, make better decisions, and improve productivity. Get leadership commitment on the early application of a change acceleration framework so that people capabilities in leadership agility, workforce transformation, talent enablement, culture, and organization structure are integrated from the start.

  Set measurable targets, joint goals, and mechanisms for cloud adoption, and create expectations for skill development at the role level to generate sustainable change ownership. Take a top-down approach to develop shared values, processes, systems, working styles, and skills to collectively drive business outcomes, and break down functional silos. Tie innovation efforts to customer experience. Recognize and reward those who continuously adopt and innovate.