Culture and change management

The people, culture, and change leadership domain is critical to establishing your organization’s cloud readiness and implementing a migration at scale. The impact of the cloud will be felt across your entire organization and will significantly affect, and be affected by, your organizational culture. Understanding these cultural implications, your organization’s receptivity to change, prior change successes and failures, organizational communication patterns to date, organizational structure, and level of executive sponsorship, commitment and alignment, are all important elements of building a successful approach to cloud adoption.

To prepare for an enterprise migration, your organization must have a critical mass of people with production experience in the cloud, established operational processes, and a leadership team dedicated to mobilizing the appropriate resources and leading teams through the many organizational and transformational challenges presented over the course of a large-scale migration effort. Based on many years of experience leading and advising enterprises across a wide array of industries, AWS has found that organizational adoption of change and political and cultural impact are the most challenging and underestimated roadblocks to cloud adoption success.

Government organizations are comprised of disparate agencies and departments that in some cases can be considered enterprise class in their scope and scale. Often, managing the IT services for each of the lines of business is handled by an IT organization, which is dedicated to supporting that individual unit. In other cases, there is a centralized IT organization providing services to all agencies. Therefore, having strategic alignment across the enterprise, including non-IT leadership, from the beginning is crucial to a digital transformation’s success. Not involving stakeholders, defined as those that have an influence over or consume the enterprise’s technology and aligning the business and technology strategies, has shown to hinder or even prevent widespread cloud adoption. Organizations need to get buy-in from the right stakeholders early in the planning and implementation process to develop a holistic cloud vision, which will drive and accelerate organizational and cultural change.

As discussed earlier, 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 usually 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 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 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 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 is 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. AWS recommends providing that opportunity through a number of different avenues, which we will outline in 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.

For more information, see the AWS Prescriptive Guidance whitepaper.

Guidelines and steps to set the foundation:

• Design the team(s) responsible for mobilizing critical cloud resources (cross-functional leaders who are able to make day-to-day decisions quickly and efficiently).

• Define how the organization builds and implements their cloud strategy by designing teams for the future state of operations.

• Establish a dedicated team with single-threaded ownership and strong, visible, engaged executive sponsorship (this is not an IT project).

• Set functional areas to be managed throughout the migration journey.

• Start to establish a cloud governance model, set of standards, best practices, and guiding principles or tenets.

To set the stage for transformation, organizations require a diverse set of views, experiences, and leadership styles. No one leader or team can achieve what a cross-functional group of influencers and change agents can do together. This section covered best practices for dealing with organizational changes, including:

• Start small, but keep the end in mind.

• Strive to define a future state model that the cloud affords, but also honor the cultural values that are core to your business.

• Be intentional about how you drive change and bring people along on the journey, and do so through strong executive sponsorship, cross-functional leadership, defining what success looks like early in the journey, and learning through hands-on experience and delivering results.

• Pilot what success looks like by establishing an initial cross-functional team, identifying a candidate workload or set of workloads to run on AWS, tracking clearly defined metrics, creating opportunities for continuous learning, and celebrating early wins.

By following these guidelines, you can set a foundation that can be emulated and scaled to other parts of the organization.