Priorities and Dependencies

Digital transformation is not easy. It takes effort, investment, strong leadership and time. As awareness of digital becomes more and more apparent within BMMI, there will be a significant amount of external pressure on the digital transformation team to prioritise some projects over others as different departments or divisions push for their needs to be addressed.

All work that needs to be produced has to be defined in terms of a user story (see User Stories in the Research Deliverables section of the digital strategy). In other words, for example, BMMI Shops would not ask the digital transformation team to help them develop a mobile app. Instead they would outline a user story such as:

I am a local Bahraini. My family and I are liberal but our neighbours and my work colleagues aren't and it's important that we aren't seen to be irresponsible. I'm not comfortable coming to the shop as I wouldn't want to be seen there. I don't like using my credit card online - I'd prefer to pay cash. I need a way to buy alcohol without it being obvious to people that I am doing so.

In this case, it then falls to the digital transformation team, in conjunction with BMMI Shops, to find the best way of meeting this user need. This might be a digital solution, for instance Amazon have recently launched an 'in car delivery' service, but other approaches could also be taken.

User stories, such as the one previously outlined above, from throughout BMMI will be organised into a prioritised ‘stack’ with the most important cards at the top of the stack.

The priority of the cards will be determined by three factors:

• The value of the customer to the business.
• The ease with which the service can be built.
• The importance of the task to the user group.

In order to keep this process fair, three approaches will be applied to this decision making process:

• The digital transformation team will collectively decide the priority of a project based on their in-depth knowledge of digital, the connected consumer and the current workload.
• An internal digital committee including management from IT, Corporate Communications and HR will be consulted
• Following this, user stories will be placed online within the intranet and can be voted up or down by anybody within the organisation.