What to Know about Digital Governance Automation

By James MacEwan

A recent survey found “92% of business leaders across regions agree that to survive and flourish, companies must enable digital channels and process automation in the workplace”

Typically within communication service providers (CSPs) there are many manual processes that are cumbersome and expensive to operate. Unsurprisingly then, there is a significant appetite to automate these processes to reduce operating errors and decrease the associated OPEX costs.

Indeed, the same survey reports that “businesses are expecting to significantly increase the number of processes that are digitized or automated over the next 12 months – on average, businesses are projecting growth rates of 20%.”

Automating Project Governance

One of the most often overlooked area that can benefit from automation often-overlooked is project governance, despite the fact that digitizing this function offers several advantages to the business such as:

Aligning the methodologies of reporting across departments will improve reporting and help provide further insight across delivery organizations.
Providing a rich source of project performance data that can be used to provide insight to these projects as well as how the delivery of the business is progressing.
Dramatically reduce the need for governance meetings, freeing up management time for other focus areas.

How to Develop an Effective Digital Governance Solution

The optimum approach for the development and roll out of an effective digital governance solution depends on many factors within the organization. Some of the considerations to ask include:

Is the delivery process stable and routine, or is there uncertainty in the end state? For example, is there say a transition from waterfall to agile underway?
Is there a way to modularize the solution? This can help deliver benefit early on, prioritizing those areas that are more stable and provide more value.
The technology to deliver the solution – can something be built using tools that are already in place such as Microsoft Power Platform? Or is a more proprietary solution such as Pega required?
Should the business be removing unrequired touch points, such as holding a meeting where a decision can be taken digitally?
When transitioning from Traditional Waterfall to Enterprise Agile methodologies, the business will be learning and adapting to new ways of working and any automation solution needs to be able to flex with these dynamic changes to the operating model.
With a digital solution, it is possible (and of course desirable) to start enforcing best practice. Are there activities that were continually skipped just because a manual process allowed this to happen? It is a great opportunity to bake in mandatory activities to improve overall quality.

As with any delivery, engagement with those who will be consuming the solution is key, but the governance process can also have a much wider impact on other process areas that may be automated. As well as the delivery teams, finance teams, senior management, even audit and legal and compliance may need to be brought in for a successful transformation.

What are the Benefits of Automated Digital Governance?

In our experience, a well-integrated Digital Governance platform provides a wealth of benefits and, alongside operational efficiency, delivers rapid ROI simply in effort reduction of senior management, delivery, and operational teams.

Some of the biggest benefits include:

Streamlining Approvals – encouraging offline approval of the business case, gates, and documentation reduces the time required by senior management to debate approvals in weekly meetings. A well-designed workflow ensures transparency of the process for all involved, removing delays for the natural cadence of these type of meetings, reducing time to market and allowing organizations significant improvement in efficiency to better compete within the market.
Document Tracking – providing a single source of truth for all program documentation to ensure critical design and testing artefacts are preserved once a program is closed and delivered and the collaboration site is shut down.
Reporting – at all levels from Portfolio to Sprint, a Digital Governance platform can provide real time tracking of status, as well as historic information and trend reporting. This in turn can inform best practice and identify high performing teams from which learnings can be adopted. Integration into financial systems can enhance these insights and cost tracking at a more granular level.

Cartesian is a specialist telecoms consultancy with expertise in overcoming the challenges of delivering Digital Solutions within a Telco environment.

Recent examples of Cartesian’s digital solutions include:

Legacy Network Migration Governance Automation. A Leading ISP was transforming its legacy network and needed experience and expertise in developing mechanisms to oversee and govern the activity that was being undertaken. Cartesian’s process and technology experts worked with the client team to secure the migration process and provide tools that gave clarity and certainty about the activities that were in progress.

Digital Project Governance Automation. A Major CSP wanted to improve its Project Management Office (PMO) function by both improving project delivery insight and reducing overall operational expenditure. Using our PMO process and technology expertise, Cartesian’s team delivered a solution that could be consumed via Web, Mobile, and Desktop. The solution brought together the information that decision makers needed into one place and reduced the need for as many face-to-face meetings. We worked with the tools that the CSP already had available, reducing the need for additional license costs.

Need to speak to us about digitizing your processes? Get in touch with Cartesian here.