Continuous change is part of any organisational journey. This could be improving processes & systems, bringing a new value proposition to market, achieve scale or delivering a new initiative. Ultimately this is about delivering a piece of work that is designed to deliver some sort of value to the organisation, stakeholders or to the customers that should in turn justify the investment in the cost to deliver this.

What are the key elements which should be kept in mind when delivering change, strategic programmes or organisational change?

1. Alignment to Strategy

This is an important consideration and one that will ultimately contribute heavily towards success. It is important to codify the outcomes the Executive team or sponsor are looking to achieve and capture their ‘why’ of any new project with the so that it becomes part of the messaging throughout the programme

• Why is this important for the business
  • E.g. the project will bring in better systems to help improve productivity
• Why is this important for the customers
  • E.g. the project will help improve the experience for our customers by resolving the most common 3 complaints we hear
• Why is this important for our employees
  • E.g. the project will deliver increased automation which will free up 4 hours each week which the company plans to use to deliver internal training as part of our ‘Continuous Learning’ plan for staff

The planned outcomes of the strategy should cascade into the planning process. The goals & outcomes in the detailed level planning must remain aligned to the top-level strategy outcome.

The biggest risk to mitigate here is not let the planning process or subsequent sub-goals of the programme deviate away from the strategy.

• Outcome based planning & reiteration

This sounds like an obvious one and it should remain the Number 1 principle throughout the planning & delivery process. It is easy to get distracted by listing deliverables & sub-deliverables as the project plan takes shape but for each phase, stage, sprint or similar ‘project activity’ of a programme, the outcomes for each these should be identified beforehand. It is then easier task to check that a ‘project activity’ has produced what was required and therefore satisfied the outcomes criteria for that component.

I have found it very useful to then re-iterate and revisit that part of the plan a number of times to introduce further efficiencies so reduce the time taken to complete the task and also to see if that project activity could be linked to the personal learning and training goals of team members who would not otherwise have an opportunity to shadow or participate in projects.

• Stakeholders engagement

I have found this to be the more challenging aspect of delivering programmes, projects, change or implementations for two reasons:

1. Senior stakeholders are busy people, focused on their own priorities and agenda. Aligning the outcomes of a programme to their priorities is important to get their buy-in at times which requires taking the required time to talk and communicate the strategic outcomes of the programme to them
2. Identification of the stakeholders is very important. It can be devastating to the momentum and credibility of a programme to learn that a key stakeholder who should have been engaged and is responsible for providing key input or approving an new business process to be used by a department has been overlooked and is not part of the stakeholder map.

• Value based solutions

Initiatives, programmes and solutions that have at its core the end in sight are more likely to fulfil customer requirements and needs. In order to establish and deliver a successful programme with a positive outcome the first step is to decide on the value proposition for the work to be performed.

The value proposition must be based on addressing specific requirements, solving problems or fulfilling a need that a customer or potential customer has. Only by having a compass pointed to a true-north-solutions will ultimately fulfil and delight customers.

Same as we continually check, monitor and control programmes and initiatives for schedule, cost, risk, scope, it is important to ensure that the original conditions for which the programme was created an that determined the value proposition are still viable. If the conditions deviate as it is common when developing a solution, the value proposition must be re-evaluated to ensure that we are still working to a solution that will be valuable for the customer.

The value proposition is then a critical factor that must be taken into account and in the forefront when resolving a customer problem.

• Flow of communications

One of the most important parts of ensuring successful outcomes is to take into account the fallibility of the understanding of how communication works. During any project, programme, discussion or conversation it is important to understand that the responsibility to ensure that messages are communicated correctly do not fall on the listener but on the speaker.

The statistics show that a great percentage that cause poor outcomes and customer dissatisfaction can be traced back to poor communication. This communication can be in the form of brochures, discussions, presentations, drawings, specifications, requirements, etc. It is therefore a cornerstone of ensuring success and opposite to our nature we must assume nothing except that the listener will require more than one communication interaction to completely capture the essence of the message.

• Ability to recover from setbacks

The ability to ultimately achieve positive outcomes, develop a programme that provides the benefits for which it was intended or delight customers does not come easily. As in any process setbacks will happen however having a  continuous improvement process mentality ultimately provides desired outcomes.

The reason that a desired outcome was achieved comes at the expense of countless hours and effort in looking for the solution that will ultimately delight a customer. Many a times this solution is not achieved during a first programme or during a first initiative. Recognizing that great outcomes are part of the process makes us understand that results can always be improved.

This recognition also provides the necessary insight that customer satisfaction is a never ending process that has a finish line that vanishes one step before crossing it. Furthermore successful outcomes, programmes and delighted customers are always the result of earlier failures that created experiences and the necessary information to ultimately

It is therefore an understanding and an expectation that setbacks will occur but on the same token relying on continuous improvement