Sustainable Automation Journey

The transformation team is an interdisciplinary team where persons from different departments work together. They meet on a regular basis to discuss objectives and report progress on them.

Representatives from the following departments should be involved in the team:

• Top Level Management
• Human Resources
• Marketing & Communications
• Innovation Management
• Selection of heads and leads from your operations
• IT and leading technicians
• Selected employees as ambassadors

Having a selection of all departments working together helps to flatten hierarchies and to make communication across departments more effective. At the beginning of the process, this team needs to sit together and:

• Gather information about the transformation process
• Plan initiatives and assign tasks for each individual
• Find out which part of the transformation could work easily to identify starting points
• Paint a picture of the future for the organization in 10(+) years from now
• Find ways to communicate the change and make employees aware of it.

One key skill to succeed with this transformation is patience. Some employees and even people from the top management fear change. Therefore, it is recommended that the transformation team provides their workforce with workshops and an educational program. Transformation is a process that is not always welcomed and is mostly not working as smoothly as expected. People will only be willing to actively support and participate in the process if they know what to expect and if they are carefully guided by the transformation team.

If something went wrong during the process, the transformation team might use the regular meetings (weekly, bi-weekly) to hold post-mortem analysis. There, they can discuss why the issue arose and develop ideas for the future to prevent this kind of situation happening again.

The transformation team can be seen as the head of the whole process (a ‘situation room’). If this team is not performing well, the whole transformation will probably fail. Be careful with selecting people. The meetings should always be precise and on-point to ensure the process is going well.