How our brains work, what we do and why we do it.

We believe in agile. We believe in process. We believe in best practices. At Crucial, we have combined the three into a proven methodology that creates success.

Step 1: Digital Transformation Assessment

No matter where your company is on its Digital Transformation (DX) journey, Crucial will work with you to improve quality, shrink timelines and reduce risk. Step 1 is to immerse ourselves into the initiative; to better understand current state, future state, obstacles, previous setbacks and to concretely define success.  We work with teams to baseline and classify progress across five core dimensions of DX - Strategy, Customer Journey, Technology, Operations, and Culture. You cannot improve what you cannot measure.

Step 2: Sequence Roadmap

Organizational change is hard. Digital Transformation (DX) is harder. We work with our clients to create an engagement roadmap that establishes a path from your vison to our reality. Why is this important? The roadmap acts as a coordination mechanism to articulate all of the engagement’s integral steps, strategic sequences and best use of resources. Through this process Crucial will ensure your DX initiative’s goals are achieved in the most effective manner possible.

Step 3: Lighthouse

A “Lighthouse” project sets the tone for the remainder of the engagement. It not only delivers on its initial value, but can create significant downstream effects. A “high value 1st win” dramatically reduces risk, builds team confidence, increases stakeholder buy-in and mitigates detractors. Our approach starts with a single, strategic Lighthouse project, designed to build cross-functional collaboration, increase engagement IQ and greatly increase the odds of initiative success.

Step 4: Team Assembly

Your organization, team’s culture and initiatives are unique. The most important step in Crucial’s engagement model is hand selecting the ideal team for your unique environment. Your team’s sole mission is to collaborate, execute, iterate and deliver world-class code. All in a manner that moves the needle, and lays the groundwork for future success. One of our core competencies is attracting exceptional talent across the entire technology stack – and leveraging it for you.

Step 5: Project Onboarding

Perhaps the most misunderstood element of an engagement is project onboarding. After your team is assembled, your Project Manager will break down the Lighthouse project into discrete hours, by function, by phase. This process creates alignment between team members and provides a common understanding of the project’s deliverables and timelines. We recognize that effective team onboarding, project intake and project governance are paramount to success.

Step 6: Delivery Model

Our delivery model cuts to the very heart of every modern DX effort - the ability to aggressively deliver solutions that accelerate response time to changes in the customer journey. In practice, this translates to implementing rapid feedback loops, frictionless decision-making, and the ability to quantifiably measure progress - whether your Lighthouse project includes process automation, system automation, the introduction of modern technologies, or other DX activities.

Step 7: Assessment & Re-prioritization

Your Lighthouse project was a welcome success. It created a highly visible, early win for the team, thereby reducing risk, building team confidence and laying the foundation for future wins. Crucial’s next step is a complete project breakdown and assessment, enabling us to understand at a detail level what worked, why it worked... and how to build on that success. We then take our internal project data, combining it with client feedback to refine and re-prioritize next steps.

Step 8. Scaling Lighthouse initiatives

Lighthouse projects are designed to prove efficacy, build team confidence, and lay the foundation for future wins. Once proven, it's time to scale out the people, process, and technology necessary to maximize business value. Continuous improvement, quantifiably and frequently measured, is the cornerstone of transforming at scale.

About Digital Maturity...

While Lighthouse projects are used to evaluate efficacy of digital tools, digital maturity itself is not a destination. Instead, it's a continuous and ongoing process of adaptation to a changing digital landscape; because digital markets and technology are perpetually shifting, an organization is never transformed, but continuously transforming.


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