Most digital transformation projects fail before a single line of code is written. Not because the technology is wrong. Not because the team lacks ambition. Because nobody stopped to question the process they were about to digitise.
Given the recent IPO of SpaceX, let's unashamedly jump on that bandwagon and talk about one of his other companies. Jon McNeill ran Tesla's sales operation under Musk and has recently written about the framework Musk uses to fix any problem in any business. Five steps:
- Question every requirement
- Delete every possible step
- Simplify and optimise
- Accelerate cycle time
- Automate
Most people who read about it will focus on step five. That is where the exciting stuff seems to happen. Take a process, make it digital. Take an existing process, implement in the new platform. Transformation complete.
But the insight that actually matters is buried in the other steps: do not optimise something that should not exist in the first place.
And step five being last is not an accident. Automate comes after you have questioned everything, deleted, and simplified. Not before.
Tesla's production hell - the crisis that nearly derailed the Model 3 - happened because they skipped straight to step five. They automated a process that was far too complicated to automate. They essentially recreated existing problems, but this time with robots. It all just ended up being faster and more expensive.
Most businesses make exactly the same mistake at a much smaller scale.
Almost every organisation I have worked with has accumulated 'Process Debt'. It is the workarounds that nobody questions. The approval step that exists because something went wrong once, five years ago, and the fix quietly became permanent. The manual check that was supposed to be temporary. The spreadsheet that only Brian in finance knows how to operate. Think technical debt, but with processes.
None of these things feel dramatic, they are just the way things are done. But because they are essentially invisible, they rarely get challenged before a transformation project begins.
Then the new platform is about to go live, and the business digitises straight on top of all that accumulated debt. The process is now faster, yes. It is also more expensive, because it is harder to unpick, and somehow generating the same problems it always did, just with a new shiny interface. Have you transformed, or have you just digitised? Have you accidentally just re-build what you had?
The fix is not complicated, but it does require doing something counterintuitive: before you touch a single new system, question the process you are planning to automate.
Not how it works.
What it is supposed to achieve.
Those are different questions, and the gap between them is usually where the debt lives.
I will write more about how to actually do that in a follow-up post. But if any of this sounds familiar in your own business - the persistent workarounds, the processes nobody can quite explain, the transformation project that did not deliver what it promised - it is worth a conversation.
Let's talk about what you're working on, and I might be able to help.