Overview
The value realization of the cloud, beyond cost savings, is measured by how well your business adapts to the new ways of working that cloud technology creates. Change acceleration delivers value in business productivity and agility for your customers. Using a programmatic and data-driven approach to change acceleration establishes an organization’s cloud fluency and readiness to address the impacts of cloud across their enterprises. AWS change acceleration dives deep into the cultural implications of the cloud, receptivity to change, history of change successes and failures, communication patterns, organizational structure, the key role of executive sponsors, leadership commitment, detailed change impacts, and cross-functional alignment of IT and business stakeholders.
Identifying the case for change acceleration can be tricky, because deep-rooted history, cultural norms, and organization politics can sometimes be difficult to see. However, there are some clear indicators that change acceleration is necessary, including drastic scope changes, multi-year timelines, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and customer leadership changes. In all of these cases, there’s a high likelihood of a strategy change, due to the sheer length of time or a change in priorities and organizational structures. Often these factors can cause a dramatic ripple effect and leave a company stalled in their cloud migration and modernization efforts. Even if you do not see a need for change acceleration today, it is important to be aware of these red flags and be ready to quickly respond when the time comes.
Cloud transformation creates widespread changes across business and technology functions. If these changes aren’t managed effectively, they might slow down or derail your transformation efforts. Benchmarking data, best practices, and lessons learned indicate that enterprises that apply a programmatic end-to-end change process that is structured, integrated, and transparent at the onset of transformation initiatives achieve higher rates of success with their cloud migration and modernization journeys than those who don’t. When you plan and deliver programmatic change acceleration at the onset of transformation initiatives, one shared reality is developed across the enterprise, because your workforce accepts, embraces, adopts, and owns these new ways of working faster, and with higher proficiency.
Managing organizational change is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, so we recommend that you customize a change acceleration framework that best fits your enterprise’s desired outcomes in cloud leadership, talent, training, communications, and culture. Identify, align, and mobilize a cross-functional cloud leadership team that includes business and IT leaders. Identify an active and visible executive sponsor. Define what success looks like early in the journey, and learn by doing. Envision the future by assessing your organization’s readiness for the cloud through impact assessments. Identify key risks, inter-dependencies, and barriers to transformation. Develop a change acceleration strategy and plan that addresses risks and takes advantage of strengths. This should include leadership action plans, talent engagement, training, and risk mitigation strategies. Develop a communication strategy to deliver the right messages at the right time to each stakeholder group. Engage the organization and enable it with new capacities to increase acceptance of the new ways of working, to facilitate learning new skills, and to accelerate adoption. Track clearly defined metrics and celebrate early wins. Establish a change coalition to leverage existing cultural levers that can help you generate momentum. Make changes persist by setting up continuous feedback mechanisms, rewards, and recognition programs.
Targeted business outcomes
Business outcomes are highly dependent on your organization, but can include the following:
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Time savings: Identify and mitigate organizational, political, cultural, or leadership blockers that stand in the way of starting or scaling the cloud journey.
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Employee engagement and growth: Create strategies for the workforce transformation to involve employees in the cloud journey, and to get them excited, prepared, and skilled in AWS technologies.
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Reduced risk exposure: Manage and mitigate risk while rewarding and recognizing desired new behaviors to reduce the risk of non-compliance as things rapidly change with cloud adoption.
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Organizational adaptability: Develop the ability to deliver more change at a faster pace, adopt quickly, and scale.
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Transformation leadership alignment and mobilization: Strengthen leadership capability, mobilize leaders to drive transformational change, and enable outcome-focused, cross-functional decision making.
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Workforce transformation: Create a high-value, agile, and adaptable workforce that can embrace change, innovation, and organizational agility to address changing customer and market demands (such as changes in buying patterns, changes in regulations, or remote versus on site working). Enable talent and modernize roles to attract, develop, and retain a digitally fluent, high-performing, and adaptable workforce that can autonomously drive key capabilities.
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Talent enablement: Modernize talent management strategies across leadership, learning, rewards, inclusion, performance management, career mobility, and hiring to ensure that the right people with the right skills are in the right roles at the right time, and are demonstrating new, cloud-fluent behaviors.
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Culture evolution: Assess, incrementally evolve, and codify organizational culture with digital transformation aspirations and best practices for agility, autonomy, clarity, and scalability.
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Change adoption: Use outputs from change impact assessments to define a strategy for adopting the new ways of working while building a change coalition network and digital acumen to effectively leverage the cloud to accelerate business outcomes.
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Organizational alignment: Establish ongoing partnerships among organizational structures, business operations, processes, talent, and culture to enable rapid adaptation to market conditions, and to improve your organization’s ability to capitalize on new opportunities.
The sections in this overview break down the AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and Organizational Change Management Toolkit in a logical fashion so you can reference it throughout your cloud adoption journey. Each section focuses on one of the six points of the framework.
About the 6-Point Framework guides
This guide is part of a set of publications that cover the AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework, which is a programmatic and evidence-based organizational change adoption framework.
The content set includes a comprehensive set of templates, guidelines, supporting artifacts, assessments, accelerators, and tools that are designed to accelerate cloud transformation. We recommend that you start with this overview to understand the framework and its six points, and then consult the following individual guides for detailed discussions of each point.
For a comprehensive set of cloud transformation strategies, guidance, and resources, see
Accelerating cloud transformation
