Most companies that decide to digitize start with a list. Twelve or fifteen processes, each with a good reason to be on it. The list is sensible, but it is not a plan. It does not say what happens first, who has time for it, or what to do when the second item turns out to be harder than expected.
This article is for a head of operations or a managing director who has already agreed that several processes should move to better tools and now needs an order. If you are still deciding which single process to begin with, read how to score candidates by hours, errors and owner first. Here the question is about sequence: how to arrange the whole year.
Why three waves
A year has four quarters, and one of them is usually lost to holidays, closing the books or seasonal peaks. Three waves of roughly three months fit what most teams can absorb. Each wave has a start, a short finish with a review, and a pause before the next one.
Waves also keep the work visible. "We are in wave two, with three processes" is easier to explain to colleagues than "the digitization programme". And three is a small enough number that the plan stays readable on a single page.
Step 1: Sort the list by effort and risk
Take your list of candidate processes and give each one two rough marks, low, medium or high:
- Effort. How much work is it to change: how many people, how many systems, how much data to move?
- Risk. What happens if the change goes badly: a delayed invoice, or a stopped production line?
Do not try to be precise. The aim is to see the shape of the list, not to calculate a score.
Step 2: Fill the waves
A pattern that works for many teams:
- Wave one: low effort, low risk. Choose two or three processes where a failure is cheap and the benefit is easy to see. The purpose is also to teach the organisation how a change is run: who decides, who tests, how people are informed.
- Wave two: medium effort, important to the business. Here go the processes that people complain about most, using what wave one has taught you about training and ownership.
- Wave three: high effort or high risk. The processes that touch many systems or sensitive data come last, when the team is experienced and when the earlier waves have already simplified the surroundings.
Exceptions are normal. A process with a hard external deadline, such as a regulatory change or the end of a supplier contract, goes first regardless of effort. Write the reason next to it so nobody wonders later.
Step 3: Keep capacity for daily work
The most common reason for a plan to fail is that it uses every available hour. The people who know the processes best are also the people who run them every day.
Decide at the start how much of their time the programme may take, and treat the rest as protected. Many teams keep about a third of the capacity free for daily operations and surprises. The exact share depends on your business; the important thing is that it is written down and that someone defends it.
Check the plan against the calendar too. If the person who owns the invoicing process is also the one who closes the quarter, do not put invoicing in the quarter-end week.
Step 4: Give each wave an end
A wave is finished when three things are true: the processes work in the new way, the old way is switched off, and people have had a chance to say what is wrong. Define these before you start. Without a clear end, wave one slowly blends into wave two and nothing is ever closed.
At the end, hold a one-hour review with the same short agenda each time: what worked, what took longer than planned, what we would do differently, and whether the next wave still makes sense.
A short example
Imagine a company with about 40 employees and a list of nine processes. The owner of operations sorts them. Three are easy and low risk: booking meeting rooms and equipment, collecting leave requests, and sending customer reminders. Three matter more: approving purchase orders, tracking customer requests and reporting on projects. Three are heavy: invoicing with the accounting system, stock records, and onboarding of new suppliers.
She plans wave one for the first three, wave two for the middle three, and wave three for the last. She protects one day a week for her team's regular tasks. After wave one she learns that people need a short written guide for each tool, so she adds the guide to every later process. After wave two she moves supplier onboarding to the next year, because it depends on a decision by an external partner.
The example is invented for illustration, but the pattern is realistic: the plan changed twice, and each change was cheaper because it happened at a review.
When to rewrite the plan
A plan for a year is a hypothesis. Rewrite it when:
- a wave takes much longer than planned, and the cause will repeat;
- a process turns out to depend on something you did not know about;
- the business changes: a new customer, a merger, a change of supplier;
- a person who was essential to the plan leaves.
Rewriting is not a failure. Keeping a plan that no longer matches reality is. The review at the end of each wave is the natural moment, and a change of order is usually enough, without starting over. For the measures to look at after a longer period, see five measures for an annual review.
What to avoid
- Starting every process at once because they all look important.
- Putting the hardest process first to "show ambition".
- Using all the capacity of the key people.
- Switching on the new way without switching off the old one.
- Treating the first plan as final.
What to do this week
Take your list and mark each process for effort and risk. Draw three columns on a sheet of paper and place the processes in them, with the reason for any exception. Agree with your team how much time they can give, and set the date of the first review. After the first wave, use the first 30 days checklist to see how the new tools are used in daily work.
Sources
- Our related articles linked above.
- The three-wave structure, the share of protected capacity and the example are a general working approach, not a standard; adapt the timing and proportions to your own organisation. The figures in the example are invented for illustration.
