Transforming low-tech companies to high-tech

I have been involved in the digital transformation of low technology companies to high technology ones. The motivation for tranformation was competitive advantage, higher profit margins and diversification into new markets. 

Almost every organization seems to include digital transformation in its vision and strategy, but most struggle with executing digital transformation initiatives. There are myriad reasons: the challenges of introducing new technologies and providing the workforce with relevant skills, ensuring that the company’s culture and organizational structures are conducive to change, and anticipating correctly which processes need to change and how, to name a few.

Key areas that I had to oversee and lead were the following:

1. Have short and to the point meetings, no excessive story telling.
2. Focus on the right problems, i.e. good analysis, instead of wasting effort on poorly defined objectives.
3. Create high tech transformation road map document.
4. Instead of local server infrastructure, use cloud services (e.g. G Suite vs Office 365, GitHub) as much as possible. Prerequisite: Fast and reliable internet connection of all offices and factories.
5. Mentor managers and lead engineers. Teach the importance and best practices of good documentation, reviews and good tests in achieving quality. Form a culture that embraces trial and error and treats failures as improvement opportunities. Focus on minimum viable products. Have short design/development/test cycles via sprints.
6. Eliminate micromanagement, communicate business context.
7. Develop critical tech (algorithms, software, electronics, tools, simulators/emulators and HWIL test infrastructure) in-house.
8. Tailor certification standards to project scope because most standards are a mess.
9. Make sure that quality procedures are adequate and applicable in real world scenarios.
10. Improve hiring practives, form capable tech teams. Provide remote working opportunities to attract talent. Isolate them from mundane work to decrease turn-over rates.
11. Improve information dissemination through wikis and forums. To improve technical docs, when an engineer is assigned to a task that he is a novice of, he also has to update documantation related to that task.
12. Have methodologies in place to support remote work (daily scrum video conferences, sprints, Google Drive, GitHub etc.)
13. Improve internet presence (dynamic web site, videos) for better marketing and recruitment.