and detailed program management does not seem to
get enough respect these days. Successful program
management includes not only keeping everyone
focused on what needs to be done (agile or not) and
on the direction the team and company should be
heading, but it also depends on continuously commu-
nicating about the process with all stakeholders.
Too much focus in cloud adoption is placed on “if we
build it, they will come,” and not enough on telling
people what you are building and why, the benefits,
and on how they should get there. As George Bernard
Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communi-
cation is the illusion that it has taken place.” During
large-scale cloud adoption initiatives, we often notice
that organizations do not have appropriate levels of
communication in place that allow everyone to know
what is happening. I have personally observed every-
thing from “well, I have sent an email” to “we will tell
them when they need to know” behavior. At Cloud
Technology Partners, we help our clients implement
a key concept we call Cloud Business Office, or CBO.
CBO addresses exactly that problem — the lack of
awareness of all moving parts.
Human Resources, Training and
Enablement
In order for your cloud initiative to be successful, you
have to have the right staff in the right seats with the
right skills. How do you get those skills? You can
Cloud transformation
initiatives are even
more complex and
difficult because they
require coordinated
efforts from a number
of organizational areas.
80 | THE DOPPLER | FALL 2018
either acquire them from the outside (hire people), or
upskill your existing personnel for the job. Either way,
talent training and enablement is a key component of
ensuring your cloud journey is successful. Not just
the journey to the cloud, but the ability to success-
fully run your business once you are in the cloud. The
organizational training and enablement aspect is
often overlooked when companies go to the cloud,
and that is unfortunate. This might be one of the most
important aspects of adopting cloud (or any large
scale transformational program). Enabling your peo-
ple for success in the cloud is not something that
happens overnight, but is rather the result of a con-
certed effort to develop the talent necessary to suc-
ceed in the new cloud world. HR and Training /
Enablement groups are the quiet heroes behind the
scenes who make that happen. As part of our engage-
ments with clients, we help them put together appro-
priate training curricula for their organizations,
develop custom-based cloud training if necessary
and establish the path for their staff to the new digital
future.
Finance
It is all about the money. Even if it is not about the
savings, it is still about the money. Here is what I
mean. In the early days of cloud, everyone rushed to
it because there was a promise of huge savings, and
that was the primary motivation for a lot of organiza-
tions. Traditionally, we have overprovisioned and
overspent in our data centers on everything from
hardware to tools. Cloud promised to charge only for
what you used and, coupled with a shared resource
usage model, allowed for significant savings. As the
years progressed, cloud forced us to do a better job of
managing our in-house IT, and the potential savings
on the cloud got a little smaller. So organizations
started focusing on additional, I would argue even
more important, aspects of the cloud, such as agility,
freedom, automation and the ability to deliver value
faster. Those benefits also mean money! The ability to
deliver value faster should translate into happier end
users and clients and higher revenue. Agility and
automation should positively contribute to more sta-