Discover our blogs

“In times of great chaos, people tend to follow a man with a plan” (Jeffrey Fry)

What happens if you have no plan? Cloud adoption was not on the agenda. Or was not done in a structured way. Or was not yet in a state of maturity needing a real framework like a cloud center of excellence. And still, overnight some of this new technology was roll-out. There was no other option. It feels like keeping plates in the air, knowing accidents are likely to happen. Security issues, cost challenges, compliance violations, …

How would you normally do this?

In normal times, companies that are choosing for a cloud first strategy or a digital transformation are at some point making decisions how they will put structure behind this. They choose a specific cloud adoption framework. Naming might be different, but they all pretty much cover the same capabilities. For more information on how we see this at 45 Degrees, check out this article. 

Once the decision on a framework is taken the first step is to plan:

• Which (sub)-capabilities will be initiated?
• Which roles and responsibilities will you assign?
• Which resources will you assign to these?
• Define the high-level scope of each (sub)-capability
• Decide on reporting & communication plan

Then an initiation phase is kicked off. The assigned resources will come together and decide on their meeting rhythm, their specific roles & responsibilities within the team and as a first deliverable make a more detailed scoping and a first execution plan.

Once initiated, the real work starts. In each team all work is done to prepare and execute the transition phase. The boundaries between “transition” and “run” state are often blurred. In reality the difference is not that important. One team can already be in transition, while another is in run state.

Within each capability workstream the teams can and maybe should work in an Agile way. That is however a discussion on its own to decide what approach will work best for each capability and might even be different depending on the culture of the company.

How to get to a Digital Agility plan?

The good news is the same approach can be followed as the one to setup a Cloud Center of Excellence. The same set of capabilities can be used to bring structure. The content behind each capability in crisis times will be slightly different from “normal times”. The transition phase will mainly focus on getting control back and optimise solutions that have been roll-out overnight. The run phase will allow to get to the new normal: secure, cost efficient and scalable. And potentially even with a good step towards being future proof.

Practically this is how we propose to do it:

• Execute an assessment to understand where you have or might have challenges
• Based on the outcome of this assessment do a quick planning phase
• Start immediately with the prioritized capabilities to get a solid view on the current state with a focus on security, cost or scalability
• Work on a plan to address these challenges first
• Expand to the next set of capabilities