Digital transformation in progress? Shift to continuous transformation.

You have a long list of objectives, written up with measures of success and teams resourced to achieve them. You have war rooms and scheduled meetings, and maybe a thousand stickies on a virtual whiteboard. You have project plans and communications plans, KPIs and dashboards.

You are ready to be finished. Done with this insanity!

Now imagine you're never done

Before you breathe that sigh of relief at the light at the end of the tunnel, take a meditative moment. Review what you've accomplished, the progress you've made, and the positive impact on your mission.

Now imagine that you are never done. That the cycle should start again, and again.

Panic! Despair! I know what that feels like.

But when your mind calms down from that hit of fight-or-flight adrenaline, consider what you could keep accomplishing if you simply extended your transformation to the next set of objectives, the next CX-driven insight, the next automation.

That's continuous transformation.

The tide doesn't stop

We, as technology leaders, know that the roadmap never ends and change is constant. Stop swimming against the tide, and you'll be swept away and lose your position.

So let's embrace this as an opportunity. Manufacturing did, decades ago. Toyota built one of the world's most admired companies on kaizen, the practice of continuous improvement. There, the idea that improvement has an end date would make little sense.

Look at what you've already built

Consider the infrastructure your digital transformation has created so far:

• Updated processes
• A comprehensive technology roadmap
• Personas, journey maps, and service blueprints for your most important customer interactions
• Competent staff and leadership driving change, and actively looking for ways to improve
• Employees who are bought in and engaged in creating the changes
• Tools calibrated to measure progress and success

This was an expensive endeavor, in more ways than financial. Shut it down at the finish line, and you'll pay to build it all again in five years.

Making the shift

• Keep the team. Shrink it if you must, but don't disband it. Go-live is phase one.
• Keep the rhythm. Set the next objectives every quarter, the way you did during the program.
• Fund it as operations. A project has an end date. This doesn't.
• Keep measuring. The dashboards you built are how you prove the return continues.

The new normal

Extend your transformation indefinitely and the return on it continues. Set the expectation that this is the new normal, and that this is how you differentiate and win.

You are now on the path to continuous transformation.

A shorter version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn. Join the discussion there.