Why digital transformation starts with alignment
We thought the process was broken
At a precision engineering manufacturer where I worked as the eCommerce manager, the dev team used a waterfall approach (everything planned upfront, then built in sequence over months).
But that timeline didn’t match how the business actually moved. Stakeholders needed changes fast. Developers delivered what had been specified six months earlier. By the time anything actually shipped, the business had moved on, and priorities had shifted completely. Everyone was frustrated.
The solution seemed obvious: go Agile. Sprint planning, stand-ups, retrospectives. Ship faster, iterate, respond to change. That would fix it.
It didn’t. In fact, it got harder at first.
The methodology wasn’t the problem
When we switched to Agile, developers pushed back immediately. Briefs weren’t clear enough for two-week sprints. The requirements were vague, and there were no acceptance criteria. They couldn’t commit to something they didn’t understand.
The business was still frustrated. Their needs weren’t being met any faster, and now they had to attend more meetings without getting what they wanted.
New methodology, same misalignment.
What we thought was a process issue turned out to be a communication problem. We’d changed how we organised the work without fixing how we talked about it.
What fixed it
We stopped blaming the framework and started fixing the fundamentals.
We wrote clearer tickets. What data, for whom, why now, what decisions does it enable? Every ticket needed context beyond just tasks. When someone wrote “build a reporting dashboard”, we pushed back: what specific data, which teams need it, what decision are they trying to make? That level of detail made the difference.
We got dev and business in the same room
Regular working sessions where developers asked questions and business explained the actual problem they were trying to solve. These were more than just sprint planning meetings. They were proper conversations where developers could challenge assumptions and the business could explain why something mattered right now.
We upskilled the internal development team
They needed to understand the business context and own the work independently. We invested in training, paired them with experienced developers, gave them space to ask difficult questions. That meant they could make better decisions without constant handholding.
What actually mattered and why. What could wait. What success looked like in measurable outcomes that the business cared about. This took time, felt repetitive, and was the most important thing we did.
It took months. It wasn’t glamorous. There was no single moment where everything clicked; it was just gradual improvement through doing the work properly.
What I see now at Rixxo
Businesses come to us thinking they need help choosing a new platform. A new CRM. A custom portal. A system that does “X”.
We’ve worked with clients who wanted to rebuild their entire digital estate because “the current system doesn’t work”. When we dug into it, the system was fine. The problem was that three departments were using it in completely different ways, with different expectations, and nobody had ever mapped that out.
They were ready to spend six figures replacing something that didn’t need replacing.
We help by facilitating workshops before any code gets written. Challenging assumptions, creating clarity about what problem we’re actually solving and for whom. Getting the people who will use the thing in the room with the people who will build it.
What feels slower at the start saves months of building the wrong thing. That’s how clients avoid wasting budget solving the wrong problem.
Sometimes that means we don’t get the build project. That’s fine. Better they spend their budget on something that actually moves the needle.
The methodology isn’t the magic
Agile works. Waterfall works. Kanban works. But none of them work without alignment first.
If your digital transformation is stuck, the fix might not be a new process. Instead, focus on getting everyone on the same page about what you’re actually trying to achieve. Why it matters. What success looks like. Who needs what and when.
That’s the unsexy truth about digital transformation. The process matters less than whether the people involved understand each other well enough to make any process work.
Sort that out first. Then pick your methodology.
