About this course

We will take you through a presentation typically used in a classroom in this course and explain every slide in both text format AND by virtue of a short video clip recorded by your guide during these sessions, who is also the Chief Architect of ADapT.

We recommend that you read through the text and then watch the video.

Enjoy the course!

What is this digital transformation fundamentals course all about? ADapT is about engaging with customers in a new and more meaningful way, innovating and solving problems for them, and leveraging technology to create new opportunities for your organisation and your customers more agilely. By doing all of that, you’re going to change your business. You’re going to transform your business into a digital-age organisation.

So Agile ADapT is a digital business transformation method. Note method, not framework – that helps organisations to become more agile.

It is not like an agile method like DSDM or SAFe of Scrum. It’s about being agile, thinking agile, living agile, and being more creative, as a result creating better value for your customers. While you’re doing that, leveraging new technology capabilities to create this value for you, your organisation and your customers. 

ADapT focuses on three primary means to get that done.

Understand your customer’s needs intimately – what it is that they need to get done. Also, have a good idea of the market you operate within and things that are happening in the competitive space.

The second driver is innovation. In response to this shifting demand from customers primarily, but also from the greater market, 

The last driver is the fact that new technology gives us the ability to realise value in ways that we were not able to do before.

So those are the three primary drivers and what ADapT is all about. 

We started feverishly working on ADAPT as a digital transformation method, most probably around 2018, and in 2021, we published the first book, Competing in a Digital Future.

The book had a greater market reception and was chosen as one of the top 50 must-read books for 2022 by Thinkers 360.

The original intent was to enable mid-sized industrial-age incumbents to transform the organisation and, as a result, make the business more digital. We soon realised that the principles apply universally to any type of business.

So, although the book was written with a specific target audience in mind, and the language in the book reflects that, you can actually use ADapT in any circumstance, from a start-up to a large corporation that’s already a digital organisation.

So we said ADapT is a method, and that means it prescribes steps to follow.

But don’t worry – it’s a high-level method, so the prescribed nine steps that you need to follow are really flexible.

You can adopt it and then adapt it to the circumstances within your specific organisation.

The next thing that you need to realise is that it’s not nine steps, and then you’re done. It’s nine steps, and then you start again.

ADapT is an iterative method, and one typical cycle, going from step one to step nine, takes about three months, so every three months, the cycle will start again. ADapT is an evolutionary approach, that helps organizations transform gradually but surely!

You want to make good progress every three months, but it doesn’t have to be big. In fact, in the beginning, it’s going to be small. And as you learn, you’ll be able to do more and more and more and more. However, if you add all of the little improvements together over a period of a year or two years, you’ll be simply astonished by what your organisation has achieved in such a short time.

 

What do we mean by a fundamental course?

The intent here is to create a general awareness of ADapT as a digital transformation method, and although we talk about digital transformation, the better term would be to call ADapT digital business transformation.
Why?

Because digital doesn’t really need to change, organisations, however, do. The result of applying ADapT principles and using the nine-step process is a transformed business.

Yes, to a large extent, enabled by technology because we use technology as a tool, but what we are actually doing is changing the business.

While transforming the organisation, we’re also going to ensure that the organisation becomes more able to respond to change, and we do that by teaching an innovation-driven agile approach that organisations can use.

When we go through this cycle of transformation, we really want to enable the organisation to be appropriate for the time and appropriately respond to the demands of society, more specifically, customers in the market it serves.

We have organised the nine-step process in three different stages. The first stage (EXTRACT) focuses on defining a digital transformation strategy.  The second stage (EXPLORE) focuses on innovation as a catalyst for transformation, and the third stage, (EXPAND) focuses on the realisation of strategy by actually building and scaling new products and services that help the organisation’s customers and help the organisation to transform.

So what can you expect from the Course?

You should better understand the practices in each of the steps and what needs to get done end-to-end to ensure that an organisation can go from an industrial to a digital age organisation. So we see the fundamental scores as a blue course.

The focus is on the big-picture and how everything fits together.

We will not teach you the details of each one of the steps in this course. There are three advanced-level practitioner courses. Actually, workshops is a better word that will teach you the details, but we’re not going to talk about the big picture when we do that, and we really need you to be able to understand the big picture when you do the advanced level practitioner workshops.

So how much effort is this going to take?

Well, if you do an online course, that’s probably you’ll invest about 8 hours.

We recommend that you read the book while attending the course, and we’ll give you a free copy of the book to read in e-pub format (ask your trainer for the latest download link.) 

Spend about ten hours, all in all, before you attempt to write the exam.

We’ll try to keep the learning simple and practical, but remember it is a big-picture course. It’s not a detailed course, so we won’t do many practical exercises.

We cannot cover the material in finite detail – that’s what you will learn in the practitioner workshops.    

Now talking about the practitioner-level workshops, they are at an advanced level and specifically intended for people who will lead parts of the transformation within the organisation.  When we say lead, we don’t mean manage.  What we are saying is, that if you’re going to play an active role in any one of the stages of ADapT, doing the Practitioner course about your area of involvement is a good idea for you. 

You don’t have to do all of them. If you want to, you can. We typically find that trainers and people who will become professional consultants do all three of them, and they need to because they need to teach people and give advice to people who are transforming their business.

The moment you pass your exam, you’ll get a Digital Certificate and blockchain verifiable Digital Badge proving that you have mastered Digital Transformation Fundamentals.

Who should typically attend the course?

The short answer is anybody who’s involved in the transformation of your business, including business people, professionals in all areas within the business, and people who take accountability and responsibility for doing work in the transformation project process endeavour.

Although attendees should come from all over the business, we typically find that most of the people who attend the training come from a product, project, or IT background.

That doesn’t mean it’s the intended audience of the course; it just happens to be that that’s where people normally come from. In reality, anybody involved in an organisation embarking on a transformational journey will benefit from attending the course.

So just a reminder, this is how it works.

You need to do fundamentals first.

Then you can do any of the advanced practitioner workshops, either the Strategy Lead, the Innovation Lead, or the Building Scale Lead.

If you do all of them, then we’ll issue an additional certificate to verify that you’ve done all of them and to validate that you can apply the entire method.

The final certification is called Digital Transformation Leader.

If you’ve done the work, passed the exams, and done the practical work for all three of these, you’ll get it absolutely free.

Although we’ve worked a long time on ADapT and used it with our customers (and some of our partners have done that also) to learn to improve the method and make things work better, it is still relatively new and unknown.

When you pass your exam and receive your credential (certificate and badge), please share it on social media and tell other people about your experience. That will help us, help more organisations and have a bigger impact!

Also, please join the ADapT community (we will talk about that a little bit later) and stay involved. Hint; there are community benefits.

We’ve already mentioned what follows the fundamental course are three advanced-level workshops. Depending on your training provider, it may be a three or a four-day workshop, but no less.

The intent is really for you to not only learn the theory but learn to apply what you’ve learned. Then there are short practical training snippets. We call it Mini or Micro-Credentials, which focuses on specific ADapT or related techniques that you can use as part of your continual learning journey and professional development activities, but we’ll tell you a little bit more about this later.

Lastly – ADapT was not the effort of one person or even one company. Many dedicated professionals has helped to make ADapT what it is today and have invested their time and effort into helping us make ADapT great.

They are our heroes; THANK YOU!