Cloud Transformation Consulting

To ensure leveraging the potential of cloud technology, it is crucial to make, often necessary, adjustments in the process organization: These often include the IT value chain (interfaces between operations, development and business), governance processes, management processes (such as budgeting, planning, etc.).

We support you to get a clear picture of your current structure. Based on your needs, best practices and reference structures, we provide recommendations for a future IT process organization.

Based on your needs, best practices and reference structures, we provide recommendations for a future (IT) organization, which allows for efficient and effective implementation of the IT (cloud) value chain.

This includes the description of key design elements in context of cloud as well as a guided evaluation process along best practice design criteria, to find the best fitting design of multiple alternatives based on the customer’s specific, existing conditions.

Sample criteria for the selection of the best fit design may be:

• Agnosticisms of activities
• Required flexibility to react to customers/ market demands
• Product types
• Type of value creation (alone or co-creation)

Having understood the transformation and change implications as well as knowing the relevant stakeholder groups, we create an architecture that outlines the steps, milestones and deliverables required to successfully implement cloud technology in an organization.

This architecture contains elements that

• are necessary to activate cloud technology (e.g., cloud assessment),
• inform about and integrate relevant stakeholders in the process and
• enable affected people to work with cloud technologies.

Implementing and leveraging cloud technology requires a range of skill development measures. From upskilling all the way to creating completely new roles (hiring/reorientation). Therefore, we support you in the skill survey, analysis and skill transformation path of your affected employees. This includes:

• Based on our reference profiles, we design a target competency model to enable your work force in supporting the cloud organization.
• We analyze the existing skill landscape, help structuring and improving it before comparing it to the defined competence models, which enables us to obtain clear indications on the maturity level as well as measures to increase it.
• Together with HR, workers' council and other stakeholders, we derive future-proof roles and a transformation path to upskill the current workforce where needed and to build a sustainable foundation for the cloud.

We understand enablement in two ways. On the one hand, we ensure that managers, change teams and employees retain their capacity to act during the transformation process. On the other hand, we enable people in implementing new required skill profiles, team set-ups, ways of working or adjusted processes.

Typical consulting mandates in this field can be:

• Agile training to develop newly created teams or teams working in a new way
• Agile coaching for new product owners or scrum masters
• Coaching of change teams/change agents to enable them to accompany the changes independently

To derive a sustainable roadmap, we need to understand the implications of the implementation of cloud technology on the organization, its people, existing behavior patterns, technologies etc. Therefore, we quantify the project impact on five to seven dimensions, followed by a qualitative description of the assessment. This first assessment is carried out together with the core team. Based on these initial results, further assessments are conducted with relevant stakeholders.

Successfully implementing a cloud technology requires a deep understanding of the affected stakeholder groups, their fears and needs. To achieve this understanding, we analyze the stakeholder groups and create personas as well as their stakeholder journeys through the transformation and change process.

• Persona: We create representations of stakeholders by collecting information about the target audience such as demographics, behavior, motivations, goals, pain points and challenges.
• Stakeholder journey: We identify a sequence of touchpoints and interactions that a stakeholder has with the transformation project over the time and map them on a timeline.

In the context of change management, a communication strategy is a plan that outlines how an organization will communicate about the change initiative and the key messages to various stakeholders. The purpose is to ensure that all stakeholders are informed about the change, understand the reasons behind it and are equipped to assist the change.

Focused on specific stakeholder groups, our strategy implementation includes the definition of key messages, selection and setup of communication channels, formats and our communication matrix as well as other tools.

Transformation and change monitoring describe the ongoing tracking and evaluation of all activities as well as their impact during the implementation of cloud technologies that are described in the transformation and change architecture.

The purpose of change monitoring is to ensure that changes are implemented appropriately and to identify any issues or problems that may arise as a result of the transformation.

We typically conduct the monitoring by defining specific KPIs and then using a variety of tools and techniques, such as surveys, interviews, performance metrics, key performance indicators, key results and objectives as well as feedback mechanisms to achieve measurability of the cloud transformation and its individual measures.