Key leadership roles in transformation initiatives

- On a television show or movie, you'll see many people in functional roles including camera, lighting, sound, wardrobe, and makeup. Leading the shoot are three key people, the producer who creates the vision, the director who executes it, and the executive producer who secures the financial resources. On a digital transformation initiative, we also need to define roles and establish who makes what types of decisions. We reviewed the vision statement template, which identified only the ideas founders and collaborators. When we're planning and executing the initiative, the first step is to identify the leaders and define the working charter. The charter roles and responsibility of a transformation initiative differ by company. Large enterprises often formalize their program leadership roles and responsibilities as part of their program management offices while smaller businesses may not have the same level of governance. I keep charter simple. Even if your organization has formalized roles, you'll find similarities to my recommendations. My approach aligns with agile product management architecture and design thinking. The three primary roles are the product manager, delivery leader, and sponsor. Product managers are responsible for the initiative's who, why, and what. They learn market trends, customer needs, stakeholder objectives, and employee workflows. They translate the vision into what capabilities to invest in and must collaborate with leaders and teams to define priorities and a roadmap. They define functional requirements, are accountable for rolling out end user adoption and oversee change management. Delivery leaders are responsible for the initiative's how and how well it is executed. They oversee executing the vision and roadmap by contributing to and fulfilling requirements. In classic project management terminology, they are responsible for on-time delivery and quality. To succeed, they're also responsible for the solution architecture and for defining the operations and support functions of what's developed. Delivery leaders must be versed in the solutions technical domain. They ensure solutions meet business objectives, requirements, and compliance criteria. Sponsors must answer how much and are accountable for budget, financial impacts and KPIs or OKRs that the vision targets. They're often hands off in leading the program, but take active roles in developing partnerships and getting support from executives. These three leaders steer the work with one or more agile teams. When the initiative has several focus areas of work and multiple teams, a product manager may have product owners leading the different teams while the delivery leader should have a team lead assigned to each agile team. We'll discuss more about product owners and team leads when we review agile methodologies in a later video. The charter may also have several other leadership roles depending on the nature of the program. Program managers manage many out of team dependencies, such as partners and suppliers. They take on responsibilities for reporting, communications, vendor management and compliance. Change leaders lead the change management program and are critical when initiative's impact many employees or transform workflows. Experts define standards and requirements and include UX designers, solution architects, data governance leaders, and security professionals. They consult with agile teams on requirements and solutions and sometimes will commit to working with them. Experts often include a mix of subject matter experts, domain experts, and outside advisors. These are the leaders' roles and responsibilities in the digital transformation initiative. So now let's look at the people these leaders connect and collaborate with, which include customers, employees, stakeholders, and detractors.