Peer to Peer Magazine

40 about things that haven't gone well in the past and know that "change is hard". First you need to appoint the right change manager and help them build their team. In an ideal world you would need someone who has implemented a similar change twice before and lived with the result at least once. If you're hiring external resources or an external organization to help with the change then you should ask them this question and make sure you're happy with the answer you get. Assuming you compromise to some extent on these criteria you already know that the person leading the change will be challenged in some way since they'll be learning some aspects of what is required as they go. You need to make sure they have the right team around them especially the right SMEs and at least one great admin person. In addition, make sure they have the right help with communication. As a rule of thumb by the time you have 5 people in the change team one of them should be a professional communications person. For smaller projects see if you can co-opt someone from your communications or marketing teams to sense check the project communication. As the Change Manager you've been set up for success by your sponsor. How should you capitalize on that great start? The most important thing is to think positive. Get early agreement of the benefits of the change and restate them often. You can stress test benefits in two ways: They must be specific enough to be placed into one of three categories; increased revenue, reduced costs and legal compliance ("not going to jail"). They must pass the repeated "So what?" test. Read the benefit out loud and then say, "So What?" Refine the benefit statement. Repeat until your benefits are clear, concise and cogent. Create a detailed plan for the entire change program. Use it to define the key milestones. Don't do it the other way around. organizations stumble on this. Ask yourself, do people here get more credit for having a better idea or for executing someone else's good idea? I'll discuss the scope, budget, planning, reporting and governance together since there is a lot of interplay between them. Often change programs have steering committees. These could be a really useful place for the sponsors and the change team to discuss progress and resolve tricky issues. Often there meetings about what is not going right or why there needs to be a scope, budget or plan change. The Change Manager reports these things to sponsors who naturally avoid being associated with things not going correctly and ask questions about why this wasn't foreseen and what can be done about it. Change Managers try to be transparent, but they often deal with issues individually and don't prepare the attendees in advance for the real discussions. A consequence of this form of dialog and governance is that we have developed change methodologies that are more focused on risks and risk management rather than on goals and progress measurement. We have budget reports, risk registers and mitigation actions, and these are discussed far more than key choices that will shape the outcome. Overly discussing risks is a slippery slope, it can often seem like every question answered generates two more questions. The tendency for the governance to create a negative or defensive attitude is not healthy for the organization, for the people working on the change or for those impacted by the change. At long last organizations are starting to take the wellbeing of people into consideration. Applying good wellness practice to potential stressful change initiatives is something you should start doing immediately. So how should you approach change in your organization. Imagine for a moment that you are the sponsor of a strategic change in your organization. How would you know it was going to succeed? You're naturally worried Communicate transparently and openly and don't let the conversation get sidelined into only the risks and negative outcomes. Make sure you have a good way to report on progress against the goals and objectives of the change. To illustrate this, take the following over-simplified example. A new desktop is being rolled out to 1,000 users in a dozen offices and your plan, for that part of the overall change program, shows that this will take 25 business days. The plan has a different number of users per day, but you can simplify the reporting by just using a constant number per day and showing it on a straight-line graph. In all likelihood you'll be below the line initially and then will catch-up. Things will slow down again at the end while you roll out that last small office and those last few tricky users. The actual roll-out will follow an approximate S curve. Neither the straight line nor the actual roll-out progress will match your detailed day by day plan. If you had used your actual day by day plan as your reporting measure every minor change or delay would have been up for debate and each change could undermine confidence in the roll-out. Also right to the last day you would look at risk of slipping. Using the straight line focuses the conversation on the goal and initially the conversation will be about catching up to the line. Once you cross the line you've demonstrated that you have the capability to achieve the goal and the conversations switch to supporting the remaining roll-out. Success is perceived about half way through the roll-out even though it is only achieved at the end. The early confidence in the process helps achieve the end goal.

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