For Startups: 5 practical tips to digitally transform your Business

CONTEXT

The pandemic forced the majority, to not say all businesses, to rethink their processes and accelerate the digitalization of their tools and daily operations.

Digital technologies are transforming how businesses innovate and how we add value to our clients or users. But most importantly, it affects the team-work and requires a high level of synergy, comprehension and collaboration between team members... all of that wont mean anything without an effective organization of tools and workflows. Traditionally, innovation was expensive and difficult to access, even most of employees needed training and acquiring the most basic IT skills. Today, with the gen Y and Z (event previous ones), are way better familiar with new technologies and also self-learners. In other words, these factors made it accessible and affordable. Nowadays, technologies enabled us to deliver a better value and collaboratively manage different parts of the organization.

"For many, the pandemic has knocked down previous barriers to digital transformation, and leaders are increasingly relying on technology for mission-critical aspects of their enterprise operations." — Mark Foster, senior vice president, IBM Services.

TIP 1: Involve your entire team in the digital transformation process (not only in operational aspects of managing and using online tools).

A new initiative's success is entirely dependent on culture, and your team plays an essential role in driving this change. It is a mistake to assign the IT department to propose digital initiatives for the business. The needs are known by the person who provides customer service, dispatches the merchandise, contacts the suppliers, updates the inventory, or handles social media.

TIP 2: Perform an internal audit or analysis to find out what the technological situation of your company or business is and the computer skills of its members.

Not everyone can start using new tools or has tech resources to implement them. These challenges concern, most of the time, the public sector and small startups. We need to know the complete panorama inside the company before deciding on which digital streamline should one use for improvement.

TIP 3: Migrate files and documentation to the cloud to make it easy to work online and from anywhere: Collaborative work.

By having individuals or groups working on cloud located files, productivity and collaboration will increase. Imagine this scenario, you are outside your office, in a meeting with a client, and need a document from his file to explain to him a potential business solution. There is no need to go to the office and explore through hundreds of papers; in less than a minute, you can send it by mail if you have all your documents in the cloud. You can start using tools such as Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Mega, and Egnyte. Organization is key. These tools even boost the productivity of your colleagues as they focus on content rather than saving, and sharing the doc via email for review or approval...

TIP 4: Implement a Project Management Software to keep track of tasks based on KPIs

A project management tool does planning, executing, and monitoring project progress something very easy. Often team members might struggle with unclear objectives, projects crossing the budget or deadlines, difficulty accessing information, back-and-forth emails, and a good project management tool avoids these messy and chaotic environments. Once you start using these types of solutions, you don't want to get rid of them. The use of this type of tools encourages individual and collective commitment and enhances clarity in communication based on objectives. Here you can find some options so you can give a try to the one that adjusts better to your team and type of business:

Asana, Monday, Basecamp, Airtable, Hive, Timely, Trello, Proofhub, Wrike and Airfocus.

TIP 5: Promote change and adopte digital attitude: Start by encouraging creativity and innovation of your team-members

Your business has a lot of potential and opportunities, and the first to know that are your colleagues. This is why managing change has to come from the bottom up, rather than simply mandated from the top so let your team propose new ideas and encourage them to study more about your sector and you will see how things will evolve.

“Upskilling the staff you have makes the most sense. The key to digital transformation is agility and the ability to constantly renew yourself.” — Isabelle Minneci, HR director, L’Oreal’s

In case you don't already know them before reading this article, these were few simple tips to help you expand your knowledge and unleash your creativity and innovation. Let us know if there are other actions that you recommend in order to promote digital transformation in a business at different levels.