A DVD rental company transforms into a film and television provider. A search engine moves beyond display ads to driverless cars. An online shopping outlet now provides cloud services to most of the Fortune 500. What do these companies, and thousands of others like them, have in common? They continuously innovate and transform to solve emerging problems and address business opportunities. If the past five years have taught us anything, it’s that to survive—and thrive—your business has to be out in front, ready to adapt to market forces. We cannot ignore Business Transformation.

PPM: The Secret Sauce Behind Success Business Transformation

Business Transformation is high-stakes, complex, and nuanced. Key projects must be prioritized, sequenced, well-executed, and measured accurately in order for a business to pivot or optimize successfully. And on the front end, idea and scope capture can pose unique challenges.

Having a well-utilized PPM tool in place can have a dramatic impact on an organization’s ability to continuously optimize and transform. Often, the data associated with transformation initiatives is managed in a loose collection of Excel spreadsheets, spread among different departments and divisions. Not exactly a recipe for success.

PPM tools can be drastically simplified to fill the critical process needs that are most important to transformation initiatives. Here are six best practices for employing PPM in your Business Transformation initiatives.

Out of the box, PPM solutions have a lot of potential bells and whistles— features that don’t necessarily need to be included for a business transformation project. Don’t let the comprehensive nature of PPM tools inhibit people from using them at all. Start simple and then add features as they’re needed. Having a well-utilized PPM tool in place can have a dramatic impact on an organization’s ability to continuously optimize and transform.

If you want your deployment to be successful from day one, it helps to focus on quick wins. Two components in particular—certification management and benefit realization—tend to produce the most bang for the buck because (a) they’re often tracked in disparate tools and (b) the value in visibility really resonates with executive visibility.

Certification management helps track the growth of your continuous improvement practices. Benefit realization helps show tangible value to key stakeholders, increasing the likelihood of buy-in and momentum. Leverage the momentum gained in these areas to quickly introduce a third capability: standardizing the capture and prioritization of demand.

In any implementation, organizations tend to have several variations on a training strategy, but it usually ends up focusing on end users. For Business Transformation, that strategy should shift focus from end users to the coaches and champions—key mentors, who guide the project leaders through every facet of the initiative.

A message resonates when delivered by trusted peers and mentors; external trainers—who make a brief appearance and then disappear—tend to be less effective. Trained mentors ensure continuity and consistency throughout the entire process.

Take a maturity-based deployment model approach, where organizations start minimally and add functionality as they go. This becomes even more critical in a Business Transformation model, where overwhelming functionality can interfere with basic, mission-critical tasks. It’s not just about collecting the data; it’s being able to understand and communicate them to others in the organization.

If transformation data is managed in Excel, it can be rather challenging to visualize. But once data is moved into a PPM system, it will give users an expansive set of new views. We recommend making information as visual as possible; focus on, in this order, persona-based dashboards, reports, lists, and extracts.

For Business Transformation, it’s all about realization and improvement over time, which look better in line charts than simple spreadsheets. Proper data visualization makes it much more likely that key individuals are going to get on board, and this is an area where PPM really shines.

In a typical Business Transformation project, you have a project leader “managing the initiative” instead of “completing tasks,” a project coach providing guidance and direction, and a project champion approving things along the way—it’s a pretty tight set of handshakes

You can automate all of this through action items and related processes in your PPM system. These workflow approvals are key, forcing checks and balances, which helps users avoid the tendency to skimp on requirements or rely solely on qualitative process to move things along.