Business transformation is hard. Far too many businesses when faced with the gauntlet of change embark on a program that’s ill thought through, under-resourced and hamstrung by poor program management processes. Leadership then becomes surprised that little benefit is gained from perhaps years of hard work.
Business Transformation programs are usually a strategy designed to bring about a specific set of goals. The task usually requires People, Process and Technology to be aligned in order to drive increased levels of performance and drive value.
At the commencement of most transformation plans, you start off with ambitious plans to revolutionize your part of the business. Great targets may have been established (“we’ll slash costs by 50%, we’ll swap out all legacy IT infrastructure in 20 days, we’ll double the sales figures overnight) – through this goal setting you’ve established where you want to get too in 2, 3 and 5 years time. The question becomes how do you do it? What should an organizations leadership do to drive successful business transformation?
Here are 10 steps for leadership when undertaking business transformation programs.
1 Whilst you might know the broad target to be achieved, look at the outset of the program to generate tons of ideas of how to get there and then quantify and qualify them. Employee engagement is a good thing, don’t be afraid of how big or small the initiative is the main thing is to generate ideas remembering that smaller initiatives added together often represent a big change.
2 Break down your vision into management deliverable initiatives – keep to the key ones and don’t over commit.
3 Spread your resources strategically. Most organizations have a few stars, they are adept at managing and delivering challenging projects. However, if you over burden them you risk burnout and people being spread to thinly who then fail to deliver. When you look at the value you’re looking to drive is most of it being delivered by a small group of team members? If so does this increase the risk of failure? And if so then what!
4 Have a robust but timely initiative approval process
Most initiatives will go through various stages of initiation, data gathering and then approval. One of the key failures of many schedules is a failure to build in how long the initiative will take to approve and demands placed on management to review and green light projects.
5 Expect to be under-whelmed. Whilst this might seem a bizarre statement most transformation impact assessments are overly optimistic. It makes sense to be a realist and not to pin all your hopes on that one big initiative to deliver 90% of the value – it’s highly unlikely to happen. Anticipating being under-whelmend prevents an over-reliance on a small number of initaitves.
6 Make the project management element of the task easy
You have your initiative, it’s been approved you have resources and then you drown them in bureaucracy, they fail and you blame them. How about instead you look to enable your project teams with simple but effective project management processes and monitoring.
Consider:
· Easy, concise reporting. With routine review cadence
· The right mix of complexity vs ease of use for project plans
· Simple & Fair approvals process
· Agreed standard metrics
· Provide fair and appropriate leadership and be involved
7 Monitor and adapt
You’re guaranteed to learn things as your projects progress. Don’t be afraid to adapt your transformation programs, agility can pay dividends.
8/ Expect risk and delays
The standard rules of project management is that bad thing happen, transformation is no different, expect challenges along the way. Build processes to help you monitor and adapt, ensure you’re management processes are agile enough to help you through problems and enable your project teams to get back and running quickly.
9/ Quantify & Qualify the benefits once the program is done and learn from mistakes
Once your initiatives have delivered engage your finance team to quantify and qualify your returns, are they what was expected, if not why not – what can you learn to better equip other areas of your transformation program. Benefits realization needs to continue well beyond the initial completion of your project to ensure that long-term impacts are monitored.
10/ Sustain continuous improvement
Once an initiative has been deployed it shouldn’t stop there. The organization needs to think about how it can continually improve –this might mean a tactical change in its metrics, it might drive specific function groups but an ethos of continual improvement prevents organizations from circling back and declining any gains made.
Got some thoughts on business transformation, we’d love some feedback in the comments section below.