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Business change, the key to growth and the key to survival. It’s not an option, no matter how great the challenges you face, you can’t stand still. Every business has to embrace change to flourish. The only real question is how much you want to achieve, how quickly you need to change and well you want to perform.
Do you want:
- your changes to be well understood and agreed by all the key stakeholders?
- your outcomes and the associated business value to be a compelling goal?
- the change process to be agreed and supported by all involved
- your staff to be enthusiastic and motivated to change?
- the business to realise early benefits and deliver consistently all through the change process?
- to know, in advance, that the new, designed business will work better than before?
- to have a predictable, measurable and engineered approach including the so called ‘soft bits’
- to feel in command of the change process?
Why would you want anything less?
Good Track Record in Change..?
The track record for business change initiatives in terms of meeting their planned objectives is poor. In study after study and from our experiences with clients, over 90% of business change initiatives fail to deliver their objectives and most are not even close. Interestingly, and perhaps counter-intuitively, that figure increases when IT change is not involved! Why is that? Why do so many business change initiatives fail? Why does it often take a second or third or fourth (or more) attempts before enough is done to get the required change made?
Simple views of business change see it as a communications activity or pseudo-HR function involving training, skills and role ‘alignment’. The unspoken assumption is that the ‘real business work’ is done through the project or programme management activity. The inference is that the people ‘bit’ is a soft or secondary activity to the ‘real’ changes being made to an IT system or in a process re-engineering exercise. Nothing could be further from the facts.
Business change invariably requires the full range of the business to be considered. This means from strategy through to product and service offerings through to the design of the processes, activities, locations to supporting technology and the performance engineering and the management of it all. Some areas and function may only be affected slightly by a proposed change, some significantly. Changes that are resisted by one area, function, group or activity can delay or derail any potential change from being implemented. The scope for ad-hoc change has in itself changed - the only scope for ad-hoc change left is often at a very localised level.
Ill-considered or uncontrolled change in any area can have a severe impact on the business. The impact of such changes may not always be immediate or obvious, as the linkages can often be subtle.
Engineering the ‘Soft Bits’...
The business change function needs to include the appropriate levels of portfolio, programme and project management relating to the proposed levels of change. It is important to note that these are tools and administration functions that form part of the change function: they do not create or ‘manage’ or engineer the change.
Change needs to be designed, engineered and led if it’s to be successful. This engineering approach must include the areas traditionally viewed as soft. We have developed an innovative and radically new approach to working with people that works well for them and you. Our Generative People Technology enables us to create a predictable, measurable and engineered way of creating change with your people. A bold claim? Our clients don’t think so
Strategies based on hope, some programme or project management, ‘soft soap for people’ and ‘just here a miracle happens’ are more than likely (>90%) to fail. Now there’s a better way...
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We know how to engineer Real World Business Change. So if you’d like to know more
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