Digital transformation is being forced even further up the corporate agenda for organisations involved in investment management. 

But if the responsibility for executing this change lays at your door, how are you supposed to keep pace with the increased drive for successful transformation when everyone involved is now working at a distance, often with additional challenges to their productivity and efficiency?

Here are a few pointers that should help you keep everything on track.

Keep Teams Coherent And Communicating

All teams face challenges when shifting to remote working. And even if your team was already remote working, the chances are that their work environment has altered significantly in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. 

As the scale of the pandemic and its consequences started to become apparent, we produced a guide to leading a productive remote working team. In addition to this advice, you’ll need to re-assess both the constituent members of your digital transformation teams and potentially the roles that they play within them. You’ll be in an ideal situation to ask for more or better resourcing of your project, so don’t be shy of putting up your hand and asking for top talent to be reallocated to your projects given the importance of seamless digital experiences.

Also in a more traditional organisation, there may be a risk of putting the cart before the horse and trying to deliver on advanced digital transformation strategies using a creaking and dated technology infrastructure that just won’t stand up to what is required of it. 

Evaluate Supplier Continuity Plans

Few if any companies can deliver on their digital transformation strategy without relying on a network of third party suppliers, both of service and technology. Whilst you’ll have done your due diligence on supply contingencies during supplier selection, this now needs to be re-visited in light of the pandemic.

Where you identify gaps and vulnerabilities, look at how you can negate them. This may be through collaborative work with the supplier on the nature of the partnership and adjusting the way you work in order to ensure on-time and quality delivery. Alternatively it might mean a heavier handed approach involving your procurement and legal departments in order to renegotiate contracts.

Review And Revise Your Roadmap

Regardless of the top down pressure for on time or ahead of schedule delivery, the fact remains that some things that seemed possible at the end of last year will not be feasible right now. Similarly, your priorities for delivery may have changed and there may be instances where elements of the projects can now be delivered ahead of schedule due to suppliers or team experiencing a drop in workload from elsewhere.

Frank, open and transparent conversations with everyone involved will allow you to conduct a full review of your digital transformation roadmap. From this review you’ll be able to reallocate resources and revise the roadmap in order to deliver the things that will make the most difference to the organisation in the short to medium term.

If you’d like an outside view on how to deliver impactful digital transformation initiatives such as digital investment platforms in your organisation, we’d welcome the opportunity to have a conversation with you about that.