This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most digital transformations are a system purchase with a strategy written afterwards to justify it. That is why most of them do not land.

Why transformations stall

The sequence is almost always wrong. A platform is selected because a competitor uses it, and it arrives on top of a process nobody has ever documented — so the first thing it does is automate the existing confusion, faster and more visibly. Nobody diagnosed the organisation, so the resistance that follows looks like people being difficult rather than people protecting something that works. And because there was no baseline, there is no way to demonstrate improvement, which means the next initiative starts with less credibility than this one did.

What this course covers

Thirty-seven lessons in the order the work actually has to go. The leadership frame first: strategy built on business goals, an honest maturity assessment, a three-to-five-year roadmap, cloud against on-premise, continuity and regulation, organising the function, vendors and outsourcing, data as an asset, selecting technologies by value rather than novelty, piloting, ITIL and COBIT as governance, portfolio management, and moving from cost centre to profit centre. Then diagnosis, which is the step that gets skipped: the research-action model, how to get leadership agreement before you have evidence, assessment through observation, interviews, surveys and existing data, the cause-and-effect diagram, four levels of intervention from individual to global, and calculating the return with Kirkpatrick and the balanced scorecard. Then the process itself: waste, standardisation, maturity, five kinds of process map, architecture, and the root cause toolkit from 5 Whys and 8D through SIPOC, DRIVE and ICOR. Then the systems: classifying solutions, mapping providers, building selection criteria before the first demo, negotiating discounts, the decision of whether to fix the process first or let the platform define it, learning and collaboration tooling, conversational interfaces, and embedded AI. Finally the people: the eight standard failures, Kotter in depth, building genuine urgency, the rider-elephant-path frame, vision, early wins and making it permanent.

A note on one block

The seven lessons on selecting and implementing systems were recorded using people-function software as the worked category — applicant tracking, learning platforms, feedback tools, chatbots. The method is what matters and it is entirely general: how to classify solutions, where providers come from, how to build criteria before you are being sold to, how discounts are actually obtained, and how to integrate a purchase with an existing estate. It is the only place in this material where a full system purchase is taken apart end to end.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 37 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the maturity assessment, the roadmap, the diagnostic set, the intervention matrix, five map types, 5 Whys, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE, selection criteria, Kirkpatrick, the balanced scorecard, Kotter's eight steps, the rider-elephant-path frame

• The diagnosis step treated as mandatory rather than optional

Where to start

Take the last system your organisation bought and answer two questions: who documented the process it replaced, and what the baseline number was. If both answers are nobody and none, that is the whole course. Enrol now and start today.