Changing Places
How to make business change really stick
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve explored, in a roughly logical sequence, the steps we might need to go through in order to change our business as our markets, technologies or customer needs evolve over time.
Step one was to work out when the right time is to kick off a major change programme.
Step two was to establish what kind of change our business really needs - is it a new technology, a new product launch, a new way of engaging with customers or something completely different?
And that, inevitably, brings us on to step three - having identified and launched a change programme, how do we actually get it to happen?
If I was going to be very black and white about it, this third stage in the change process is where I see most businesses come unstuck. A lot of effort has gone into identifying an important change the business needs to go through. External consultants have been involved and given the idea their ‘seal of approval’. The Board has met, agreed the project and approved the budget. What could possibly go wrong now?
If you’ve ever lived through a major change programme running wildly over time, needing extra budget allocated, becoming a huge distraction from day to day business and ending up being quietly shelved, then you’ll know that there is plenty that can go wrong. Here are just a couple of things to watch out for:
Is everyone really bought in?
Yes, everyone nodded in the meeting and because the project has Board backing no-one will publicly dismiss it, but that is a long way from everyone really being bought in.
My observation is that it is often the ‘psychology’ of change projects which goes wrong first. A new technology challenges the expertise, authority and status of people who are more familiar with the old one. A new channel to market (like a big drive to digital selling) inevitably means less investment in the existing ones (like your store estate), but there are people in those existing parts of the business who will likely feel challenged and threatened by that. A new acquisition that needs integrating inevitably brings with it new people who are ‘not like us’ and ‘do things differently’.
Paying proper attention to the real and perceived concerns of people across your business is an essential part of getting a change programme to land. The investment of time up front in making sure you really have the hearts and minds of your teams and that everyone understands the rationale for this change and the consequences of not doing it is critical.
Do you have the skills that you need?
It might sound obvious, but change programmes usually mean that you are going to have to start doing different things in different ways - and that can be a tricky thing for a business to navigate.
Ask anyone who has been to ante-natal classes and they will tell you that those classes spend far too much time preparing couples for the day of the birth and not enough time preparing for what happens in the 18 years that follow!
In much the same way, when businesses think about the skills they need for a big change project, they tend to spend all of their time wondering about the programme- and project-management skills which are necessary to get the project to happen. That’s important, of course, but there is also the small matter of whether you have the skills in your business to actually get things done when the project is complete - if you have integrated a new business, do you have the expertise to run it? If you have invested in a new technology do your IT colleagues know how to keep it alive and deal with any problems which later arise?
Are you over-complicating things?
If I had to come up with the single most common reason why an otherwise well-timed and well-judged change programme goes wrong, it is embodied in the phrase “business requirements”.
Every project starts with some kind of requirements-gathering exercise, and there is nothing wrong with that in principle, of course.
The problem is that such an exercise often becomes a list of thousands of individual peculiarities of how the business operates today which everyone wants to be replicated in any change programme. A project which started as “there is a great new technology out there that we should implement” suddenly becomes “we need to spend 2 years customising that new technology so that it does exactly what we do now and we don’t have to change any of our business processes”.
And if you think that is a far-fetched scenario, I once came across a change project which had run entirely into the sand because the prospective users of a new technology ended their financial reporting day at a different time than the new technology did, and were insisting that the whole software be rewritten to meet their needs rather than considering simply changing their existing process.
Are you ‘boiling the ocean?’
The other risk of the ‘requirements gathering’ process is that change programmes get bloated with ever more elements - each of them probably perfectly sensible but in total creating a monster project that has no change of actually delivering.
Boards and senior leadership teams are often their own worst enemies on this ‘scope creep’. Having the discipline to stick to a narrower but deliverable project scope is tricky when there are many other things the business could do which would also be helpful or profitable, but the loss of that discipline has killed many a change programme (and more than a few businesses).
Three steps
In summary, then, across this series we have looked at identifying the right moment where your business needs to change (not too late, but also not over-enthusiastically chasing every new technology or business school idea). We have looked at how best to identify the change that is right for your business, often rooted in the powerful insights you can gain from your colleagues across the business and from real customer engagement.
And now we’ve looked at some of the disciplines necessary in order to give your change programme the best chance of success.
I’d be very surprised if there aren’t a lot of people reading this with their own scars from big change programmes and their own suggestions about how we can best make them a success. If that’s you, please do share your views, here or on LinkedIn - this is an area where we all have a lot to learn from each other.
P.S. As I’ve mentioned before, this series of posts came from a great discussion with Justin and Sue at Barracuda, who have also been your sponsor for the last couple of months. This post is also the final one in that sponsored sequence and I want to thank the Barracuda team for their support and valued input along the way.
