Welcome to Week 3 of our Digitally Fit Bootcamp – where we’ve been putting you through your paces and whipping you into shape for Digital Transformation.

We’ve been making you sweat these last few weeks! Sofar we have focussed on Agility and Strength and now for the ultimate digital sweat session we move to Speed training.

Now that we’re digitally fitter, stronger and more agile – today’s workout should be an absolute breeze.

I mean the need for Speed when it comes to Digital Transformation is pretty obvious, right?

For sure we need to be fast to innovate and outpace the competition. It’s no longer acceptable to spend weeks and months planning, tweaking and perfecting plans and presentations of what we’re GOING to do.

Instead, we need to focus on the MVP – the Minimum Viable Product approach – where we get the very basic idea/concept/system/process/product going and then we amend and tweak as we go.

This brand-new way of working, for many organizations, can send shivers through the spines of those who love to have all their ducks in a row before taking action.  Taking the MVP approach means asking employees to get out of their comfort zone and work very differently.  Resistance (is futile) but to be expected.

We have found that when we take the time to explain why it is important to be quicker on our feet, more responsive and experimental in our approach (that there is method behind the madness) the majority of people do get on board and are exhilarated with the new techniques, processes and, of course, results.

So now that we have the warm-up done let’s get down to business.

All this talk of speed can be a little intimidating, we get it, and it’s equally as disheartening if you’re constantly being told to hurry up at work. We all know that old saying: “More haste, less speed”.

Rushing can sometimes lead to a drop in quality, increased confusion and employee fatigue.

But our training today is focussed on efficiency, techniques to enable staff to prioritise and ways to recreate the business culture to enhance overall productivity.

And the outcome? Better results, faster!

Let’s break today’s workout into six quick blasts that will be key to increasing speed.

Prioritise – Too often employees approach tasks without enough detail to effectively prioritise. What tasks are important? What tasks are urgent? Can the tasks be delivered in stages? Open lines of communication between staff and management can help alleviate confusion and enhance output by making sure focus is on the most high-value and important tasks.

Outline Expectations – This goes hand in hand with prioritisation because leaders need to empower staff to be agile and efficient by outlining exactly what the end goal is. Don’t confuse this with spoon-feeding employees. Au contraire, this is about giving them the autonomy to approach a project how they see fit as long as the end result aligns.

Remove Red Tape – We focussed on this in week ones Agility session but it’s so crucial to Digital Transformation success that we brought it back for today’s session. No matter what size your organisation your processes need to empower and enable speed and agility. From small things like vacation approvals and remote email access; to big things like customer facing processes and budget requests. There is no time for needless and onerous hurdles that delay and frustrate progress.

Create Templates – Pretty much what it says on the tin and this simple step can save so much time and energy. Identify the repetitive tasks in your team and create templates to fast-track their completion. These can be a selection of standardized slide-decks for weekly reports, business case design documents, FAQ’s for administrative tasks and checklists for important monthly activities. Templates also make great additions to improved onboarding packs for new recruits.

Collaborate and Delegate – Fear of delegation is real because it’s too often confused with shirking responsibility or even worse as slowing down progress. Forget that nonsense! Collaboration and delegation are key to digital success and healthy business cultures.  There is no better way to speed up productivity AND gain back quality time for more high value tasks by collaborating with the right colleagues and delegating to tasks to your team.

Automation – The dreaded word that means robots stealing our jobs, right? WRONG! If you look at it in the context of speed and agility, having mundane, repetitive tasks automated means you can focus on more high value outputs!  At Dee is for Digital we are HUGE fans of Zapier (check out www.zapier.com) to create automation “zaps”.  It is a super easy way to automate all kinds of repetitive and low value tasks so that we can focus our attention on more important work.

And that’s it from us for today.

If you have any questions about what we have covered or would like to find out more about how you can apply some Speedy techniques to becoming even more Digitally Fit – feel free to drop us an email at hello@deeisfordigital.com.

Written by Alana Fearon

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