Digital technology alone will not make a business more efficient. Technology is powerless where chaos reigns — it only makes the chaos faster.
This book lays out a systems approach to managing a company: how structure, processes, constraints, project and product management, and the psychology of change fit together, and how the right combination of the three lets you cut risk and deliver real digitalization even when resources are short
Inside the Book
1. The Foundation: Structure and Processes
Most companies attempting transformation have no system at all — either chaos held together by a few key personalities, or bureaucracy that suppresses them. This chapter starts with the basics you cannot skip: types of organizational structure and how to choose one, the typical composition of a digital transformation team and who does what in it, and the practical approaches to describing and modeling your business processes.
2. Finding What Actually Limits You: Theory of Constraints, Lean and Six Sigma
Two disciplines that decide whether your digital investment pays off. The Theory of Constraints shows how to find the one bottleneck that governs the whole system, so you spend money where it changes the result — five steps, the key tools, the types of constraints, and the mistakes people make applying them. Lean and Six Sigma then show how to remove waste before you automate it: the four principles, the 14 Toyota Way rules, muda, mura and muri, the core toolkit, the honest limitations of Lean — and how it all combines with IT.
3. Getting Things Delivered: Project and Product Management
Why projects fail statistically, which standards and approaches exist, and how to pick the one that fits your case rather than the one that is fashionable. You get the full project lifecycle with a task checklist, the competencies a project manager actually needs, delivery methodologies, risk management, and how to build and prioritize a portfolio. The product side covers the difference between a project manager and a product owner, the stages of building a product, and the tools behind each of them.
4. Regular Management Practices: The Daily Toolkit
The habits that produce results fastest and cost the least: how to run the management routine, how to introduce change and work with resistance, what really drives motivation, how to form a team — and how to measure the outcome with KPIs and OKRs without turning them into theater. Three chapters of tools, each with the author's view on when it works and when it backfires.
5. Communication and Internal PR
The author calls this the secret ingredient: even without any digitalization, fixing communication between departments solves a large share of a company's problems. Short chapter, four practical examples, immediately applicable.
6. Cases From Practice
Eleven cases showing what happens when even part of this system is put in place — from pulling a burned-out owner of two companies out of daily firefighting, to tripling productivity in three months with a team that started out wanting nothing. Real numbers, real constraints, including what did not work.
7. Competencies, Roadmap and Strategy
The closing block turns everything above into a plan. What each member of a digital transformation team must know and be able to do, with a competency model and a competency matrix you can apply to your own people. Then the roadmap: preparation, technology rollout, locking in the change and commercializing it — with IT systems and technologies sorted into first, second and third priority, plus the infrastructure, information security and data management layers underneath. And finally the digitalization strategy itself: assessing where you are now, defining the target model, building the technology, organizational and HR project portfolios, estimating the money and people required, finding sources of funding, and measuring whether it worked.