McKinsey Academy

Digital

Build the capabilities needed to realize digital aspirations

The ability to deliver in a digital world is more important than ever. Businesses that once mapped their digital strategy in one-to three-year phases must now scale their initiatives in a matter of days or weeks. Agile, analytics, technology, design, and leadership capabilities are essential to enable this, however, building these capabilities can be difficult. Knowledge, skills, and behaviors must be aligned with how teams and key roles create value for the business.

We work with organizations to build these capabilities and achieve aspirations in digital and analytics. We use a broad range of learning interventions to help individuals and organizations develop foundational knowledge, mindsets, and skills on core digital, analytics, and agile topics in order to deliver measurable and sustained business impact.

What we do

Digital transformation
Develop the leadership knowledge, capabilities, and mindsets required needed to launch, execute, and scale digital transformation.
Agility 
Build foundational skills to launch new agile teams. Develop deep capabilities most critical to driving agile transformations, such as vision setting, building MVPs and developing agile mindsets.
Analytics
Capture value from advanced analytics by building capabilities at all levels–from senior business leaders to data scientists and translators–to improve literacy, upskill, and scale analytics.

Our Approach

 

Digital expertise: In the past few years, we’ve completed hundreds of technology transformations and new-business builds. Our learning experts work together with our technology leads, data scientists, developers, and agile coaches to design and develop world class capability building programs.

Go & See: Visit organizations around the globe that have undergone successful operational transformations and learn from their experiences. Virtual options available.

Sample programs

Agile Foundations

Program objectives: Develop the skills and mindsets required to launch agile teams and enable learners to collaborate effectively, including in remote environments.
Target audience
New or early agile teams; teams that require upskilling
Learning objectives
Develop the skills and mindsets to effectively launch agile teams and enable teams to work together effectively, including remote collaboration.
Participant feedback

“I want all of my directors to be able to take this course if possible.”

“I most valued the interactive portions and team break out sessions. I will be able to use the structure of the scrum with my team.”

“I must admit...I was a skeptic, but this full experience has really opened my mind.”

Analytics Translator

Target audience
Managers on the trajectory to act as a bridge between the business and technical teams.
Learning objectives

Identify the right business opportunities that can be transformed through use of analytics and structure the problem working with technical talent. 

Understand the basics of data science and engineering and communicate model outputs in business language. 

Drive implementation and adoption for an analytics model.

Participant feedback

“Great balance of lectures and exercises. It was especially beneficial to hear real world examples from the faculty of real-world applications.”

“This experience was very relevant! I can apply everything I learned here in my job.”

“Great mix of theory and practice to understand the potential and possibilities of advanced analytics, and how it applies to our company.”

Our Impact

Building foundational digital literacy for top leaders at a LATAM bank 

A Latin American bank is in the midst of a multi-year enterprise-wide digital transformation. The CEO realized that upskilling the bank’s senior leaders with foundational knowledge on core digital topics was essential to the transformation’s success.

We partnered with the executive team to deploy a curated suite of on-demand online courses to the bank’s top 450 leaders, covering topics like design thinking, building an MVP, and agile. The courses were designed to be the foundation first phase of a deeper capability building program for leaders and practitioners.

After the initial senior leadership group completed the program, over 90 percent said the knowledge and capabilities they learned would empower them in their day-to-day jobs. One leader shared that the learning “let me develop a new mindset to be ready to tackle our current challenges.” Ninety-seven percent said they would recommend the courses to colleagues.

Featured Insights

The analytics academy: Bridging the gap between human and artificial intelligence
Article - McKinsey Quarterly
The analytics academy: Bridging the gap between human and artificial intelligence
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As organizations rebuild their foundations to compete in the era of data and advanced analytics, in-house capability-building programs offer the best way to train workers up to the task.
Building agile capabilities: The fuel to power your agile ‘body’
Article
Building agile capabilities: The fuel to power your agile ‘body’
-
To move your organization from targeted experimentation to driving agility at scale, it’s crucial to focus on agile capability building.
Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations
Article
Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations
-
To build and lead an agile organization, it’s crucial that senior leaders develop new mind-sets and capabilities to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization.
Growing your own agility coaches to adopt new ways of working
Article
Growing your own agility coaches to adopt new ways of working
-
Agile coaches play a vital role in enterprise-wide agile transformations. To develop enough coaches, companies should create specialized training academies.

Related practices

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Learn how we work together with clients to build analytics-driven organizations and achieve better performance through data.
McKinsey Digital
Digital
Learn how we help clients use digital to create value by reinventing the core of their business.

How We Help Clients

Connect with our People & Organizational Performance Practice

Contact us