Jump to

DT:TV Case Studies

5. Reflect & Evaluate:Internal & external

EVALUATE//REFLECT//LEARN

Overview

The Digital Transformation Approach requires organisations and individuals to undergo a process of continual reflection and evaluation. The various steps in the approach provide natural pauses where this can take place. From initiating a project, through audit, discovering and and defining, onto designing a business case and through delivering implementation, the toolkit encourages ongoing reflection on the nature of your digital transformation and the impact it will have on your organisation.

Internal Reflection

Digital Transformation is never just about technology, its always more about how to make digital technologies work better so that you can deliver your value proposition to your customers through digitising some or all of your core capabilities. In all digital transformations, it is important to involve your whole organisation in the learning around the project, even if not everybody is going to be directly involved in its delivery. Keeping a document like the learning loop document from Nesta up-to-date is a great way to engage others with where the digital transformation is at, and where it has impact or needs to be improved:

Download this document (PDF, 192KB)


(Shared via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence).

For staff and others who are working on the project, having some mechanisms for reflecting on the project can be highly beneficial, now and at a later date. As well as “formal” reports on the project progress, “informal” methods, such as blogs, or messages on your intranet, can keep other staff aware of what is going on. Ensure that the project is not isolated from the rest of your organisation, and is mentioned at team and management meetings on a regular basis. During the implementation you might want to have a more formal process for measuring progress, for instance through the use of an online project management tool (such as Wrike), or a regular reporting mechanism.
Encourage regular presentations about the project to your team and to others. Make one of the outputs of the project the production of a case study and give someone the job of developing this – it might be a useful task for an intern or a new starter, who could use rich media such as digital video as a part of it.

Case studies work well when they answer the WWWWWH (What, Why, Who, When, Where, How) questions and then conclude with reflections about the successes and failures of the project. You could present this as a written document with images, a comic strip or a short video. Use the AmbITion guide How To… Digital Video for Beginners to get started, and consider using a storyboarding tool to help you organise the story, the shots and content you’ll need – this education sector storyboarding tool is useful: – remember, tell an engaging story!
Reviewing the Project

At the end of a project where an organisation has followed The AmbITion Approach it is likely you will have a series of useful documents that have been generated at various stages of the project.
These may include:

  • an initial risk assessment
  • an audit of the organisation’s current technology, digital capability, and business model
  • a business case
  • an implementation plan
  • regular “highlights reports”

Use these to reflect on where you are now and create a final report, highlighting the transformations.

External Evaluation

External evaluation is useful if you have the time and resources to do it. Even if you are not committed to an external evaluation of your project – or it will only take place after it is complete – it is worth considering whether you can involve an external evaluator from an early stage of the project. You may want to ask any consultants who are working you through the approach to undertake some “light touch” evaluation alongside their other work, or you might ask a university researcher or other interested party to be attached to the project from the start.
Although your SMT will want to know that you have achieved the outcomes of the project, and spent the funding correctly, The AmbITion Approach encourages self-reflection throughout the project. Ideally, any final report should be more than a formal review of the project: it could be a vibrant set of resources that can be used to promote your work, and that can inform the development of future projects – especially if you evaluate what your users think, and share lessons learnt with the wider sector.

What’s Next?

You should now be ready to look for the next digital disruption that might mean your organisation has to digitally transform again. You can start your next digital development project with the confidence that comes from having successfully delivered your previous project. Good luck, and if you’ve a good story to tell, then we’d love to hear about it!