Insights & Perspectives

Running a Transformation Office on SharePoint, DevOps, and Power BI

Once a transformation program signs its vendors, a second project begins that nobody budgeted for: running the program itself. At a provincial Crown insurer, the discovery phase involved five selected system integration and advisory vendors, a management office, and workstreams that each wanted their own tracker, their own template, and their own definition of “at risk.”

We ran it on Microsoft 365. The tools themselves were unremarkable. What a shared toolset did was force everyone to agree on things they had been avoiding.

Outcomes Before Requirements: Writing the RFP for a Digital Transformation

Most RFPs are inventories. Hundreds of “the system shall” rows, harvested from the current system and whatever the incumbent vendor already does. They are easy to write and nearly impossible to evaluate, because every proponent can tick every box and nobody has said what the organization is actually trying to become.

When a provincial Crown insurer launched a multi-year transformation to become a high-performing, customer-centric digital insurer, the RFP workstream started somewhere else: with outcomes.

Four Apps, One Roadmap: Product Ownership in an Enterprise Mobility Group

Enterprise mobile applications have a reputation problem. They get built because a business unit asked, they get rolled out because a project closed, and then they sit on a device next to the apps people actually use. At a provincial power utility’s enterprise mobility group, I was product owner for four application initiatives, and the goal was simply to avoid that fate.

A roadmap is a set of promises with dates

All four initiatives shipped within budget and on time, and I give the roadmap most of the credit. It tracked features, user stories, test cases, and the feedback and suggestions that came out of every product demo, in one place, so that a request from a demo in March was visibly either scheduled or declined by April. Nothing kills adoption faster than feedback that disappears.