Best practices

One of the most critical factors in driving successful transformations is setting ambitious yet achievable targets. Companies that set transformation targets at 75 percent or higher of their trailing earnings are more likely to earn outsized total shareholder returns.¹ By setting high expectations, organizations create a sense of urgency and motivate their teams to strive for exceptional results.

It is equally important to ensure that these targets are grounded in a comprehensive, fact-based assessment of the business opportunities and potential value at stake. The AWS Enterprise Transformation program emphasizes the importance of conducting a thorough discovery process to validate business objectives, identify improvement opportunities, and develop a detailed transformation business case.

Successful cloud transformations require close collaboration and alignment between cross-functional IT and business teams. These cross-functional teams are empowered to drive the transformation effort, make decisions, and remove roadblocks. They are responsible for aligning the transformation initiatives with business objectives, prioritizing initiatives based on potential impact, and ensuring effective communication and collaboration across the organization.

The AWS Enterprise Transformation program promotes the creation of cross-functional cloud leadership teams that bring together stakeholders from various departments, including IT, finance, operations, and business units. This function is critical in driving adoption to changes in how their organization thinks, decides, behaves, and innovates using the cloud.

Culture is the way things get done in an organization. Culture is the way decisions are made, work is completed, and lasting changes are adopted. When implementing cloud adoption, an incremental culture shift is needed in order to operationalize strategic value from the cloud. This includes moving from waterfall to agile working, from permission-based decisions to autonomous decisions through codified best practices, from a fear of failure mindset to experimentation for innovation, and from cost savings to value generation.

The AWS Enterprise Transformation program emphasizes the importance of conducting immersive training and experimentation sessions to build cloud fluency, operationalize new ways of working, and deliver minimum lovable products (MLPs) that demonstrate early success.

Experiential learning is a game changer in adopting the cloud, because it helps speed up how the workforce develops new digital skills, problem-solves, retains knowledge, and becomes more confident to make the right decisions. This involves hands-on experiences and real-world scenarios that enable teams to build valuable skills and evolve mindsets. By encouraging experimentation and celebrating both successes and failures, organizations can create an environment that embraces change, promotes continuous learning, and drives innovation.

AWS uses a range of experience-based mechanisms, such as immersive exercises, collaborative classroom training, and role mapping, to help organizations rapidly build cloud capabilities and accelerate adoption to new ways of working. The AWS Experience Based Acceleration (EBA) mechanism uses hands-on, agile, and immersive interactions to empower teams to build end-to-end solutions, break down silos, and develop self-sustainable working models. EBA sessions not only build technical skills but also foster cross-functional collaboration, address leadership blockers, and accelerate decision-making.

Effective cloud financial management is essential for maximizing the value derived from cloud investments. This includes defining a common financial language, conducting rapid consumption analysis, implementing cost optimization technologies, automating financial processes, and establishing unit economics-driven reporting.

By adopting FinOps best practices, organizations can optimize cloud investments, reduce waste, and align their FinOps strategy to evolving business priorities. The AWS Enterprise Transformation program provides best practices for developing a best-in-class FinOps capability that is strategically aligned to the organization's financial reporting and governance requirements.

To sustain transformation business outcomes and drive continuous improvement, you should embed transformation disciplines into your organization's business-as-usual processes. Integrating transformation disciplines into these core business processes fortifies the adoption of desired behaviors, mindsets, and practices, and ingrains them into organizational culture. This cultivates ongoing workforce adaptation to changing market conditions and customer needs, and promotes innovation for competitive market share.

The AWS Enterprise Transformation program uses evidence-based frameworks and accelerators to pragmatically evolve and sustain organizational, operational, and financial practices and processes that accelerate business outcomes and strategic cloud value. This includes annual business planning, budgeting, forecasting, performance reviews, and resource allocation processes.

By taking advantage of cloud expertise and proven solutions, organizations can accelerate their transformation speed, avoid common pitfalls, and benefit from the collective wisdom and experience of transformation experts. The cloud transformation timeline is often extended or stalled due to a multitude of factors, including deficits in goal-setting, decision-making, portfolio planning, program management, organizational change management, communications, cloud skills, and IT and business alignment. Resistance grows, teams revert back to their old ways of working, and cloud value realization is delayed.

Taking time to set a solid foundation at the start saves both time and money. Investing in a programmatic business-led framework has proven to advance more value from cloud investments² and reduce cloud value capture erosion during the goal-setting and planning phases (by 45 percent), the implementation phase (by 35 percent), and post go-live (by 20 percent).³ Working side by side with experienced subject matter experts allows for a transfer of knowledge, reinforces ownership, and improves stickiness.

The AWS Enterprise Transformation program includes an evidence-based methodology, tailored playbooks, content artifacts, reference architectures, and prescriptive guidance based on best practices and lessons learned from thousands of customer cloud transformations.