Challenges of maintaining disciplined change processes
Successful improvement programs require disciplined change processes.
Whilst good systems can get you part of the way there, the improvement team need to keep processes running effectively by ensuring disciplines are kept across the improvement program.
Lets understand some of the key challenges to maintaining effective change processes and the common failure modes when disciplines fall away.
And then what you can do to maintain the disciplines for each of these processes.
Implementation planning challenges
Common challenges during implementation planning are:
- Initiatives don’t have all the required information e.g.,
- Work plans are missing and/or steps are not clear and deliver a tangible outcome for each step (i.e., don’t use an active verb)
- Measures of success are not explicit (impact and process KPIs)
- Sustainability steps are missing
- Risks not identified
- Some of the information is inaccurate e.g.,
- Benefits are not identified and/or they are overstated
- Expected costs are too low
- Timeline is too optimistic
Any or all of these issues are significant enough the cause problems when evaluating whether there initiative has sufficient merit that it should be approved for approval.
In some organizations, particularly those without good stage gating, these issues are simply waived through only to create major problems later on:
- Not clear if initiative is on track or behind (in terms of process KPIs, benefits, timeline)
- Low actual benefits and the initiative should probably have been put on hold rather than consuming time and resources
The primary way of maintaining disciplines for implementation planning is stage gating (as we alluded to above).
Effective stage gating ensures that the initiative does not pass through the gate until the required approvers have given their approval. If not approved, the gate approvals need to be explicit about the reasons for not approving the initiative so that the initiative owner can add the additional detail needed.
The implementation gate (after implementation planning stage) is a critical gate that should be reviewed by three gate approvers:
- Business sponsor to ensure that the initiative will generate value to the business and that the value is worth the incurred costs and business risks (and that the initiative is adequately resourced and the timeline is realistic)
- Finance to ensure that the costs and benefits are accurately calculated and make sense i.e., the initiative has a ‘money’ step that will generate value to the business
- Improvement team to ensure the overall quality of the initiative i.e., the plan makes sense and will deliver the expected improvement
In addition to ensuring that an initiative requires a stage gate after implementation planning and before going into implementation, another measure to maintain good disciplines is effective capability building for the initiative owners so that they can understand what is needed for the initiative prior to the implementation gate.
Locking-in sustainable improvement challenges
Common challenges at the end of implementation at the ‘lock-in’ gate are:
- Not all work steps completed
- KPIs have not reached the expected target levels
- Sustainability best practices have not been considered or used
If an organization does not keep good discipline on locking-in improvement – the inevitable failure modes are:
- Initiative never delivers its promised value, or
- Initiative is partially successful in delivering results but then quickly loses value as old practices/behaviours reassert themselves.
Similar to maintaining good implementation planning, the primary way of maintaining disciplines for locking in improvement is stage gating.
Effective stage gating ensures that the initiative is not closed out until stakeholders are satisfied that gate conditions are met i.e., work plan has been completed, KPIs have reached expected value and sustainability steps have been considered.
The lock-in gate (the final gate before the initiative is closed out) should be reviewed by:
- Business sponsor to ensure that the initiative work has been completed and is delivering the expected value (process and impact KPIs show the initiative is delivering)
- Finance to ensure that the actual costs and benefits are accurate and make sense (which will be different to the originally estimated costs and benefits)
- Improvement team to ensure that best practices have been considered for long term sustainability
And, similar, to implementation planning, the Improvement team should provide effective capability building is effective capability building for the initiative owners so that they can understand what is needed at the ‘lock-in’ gate.
Stage gating challenges
In both earlier challenges, stage gating is the primary mechanism to ensure good disciplines are in place for both implementation planning and lock-in gates.
But what if the stage gating process itself has poor disciplines ? Example failure modes when this happens include:
- Initiatives are approved without all stakeholders approving
- Key information is not reviewed properly by gate approvers (and initiative benefits are over-valued)
- Initiatives are closed out before being properly completed
Effective ways of ensuring that stage gating is working well are:
- Use good systems that are easy to use and effectively block the initiative from progressing through the pipeline without the required approval from all stakeholders
- Ensure that the Improvement team themselves (workstream or change leads) need to approve the critical gates so that they can apply a Quality Check to the initiative
- Ensure that everyone in the improvement team is properly trained on the stage gating process (including the purpose of using it)
- Ensure that Finance is held accountable for approving the final value of the Transformation (made from its constituent initiatives); Finance should have a vested interest in ensuring that value is correctly attributable to each initiative so that the total value of the Improvement program is correctly recognised
Effective progress review challenges
A critical change process for the Improvement program is to run effective progress reviews. Progress reviews ensures the Improvement program happens at pace and delivers on its intended objectives.
Common challenges to effective progress reviews include:
- Progress reviews don’t happen at all
- Scheduled progress review start time constantly changes and/or reviews start late
- Key people are late or don’t attend.
Allowing poor disciplines (low standards) on maintaining good discipline for progress reviews will take a toll on the effectiveness of the progress reviews and ultimately lead to people saying the reviews don’t work and then dropping the reviews altogether as they’re ineffective.
Don’t allow this to happen!
Ensuring good process discipline for the progress reviews will fall naturally on the Improvement team. However, this is impossible to fix without leadership support (as they are effectively the chairs for each progress review). It should be noted that the Improvement team should facilitate the reviews and help ensure that the information is available for an effective progress review but the progress review soul deb led by the business sponsor. So a first step in fixing progress review discipline is to enlist leadership support.
Good practices that have successfully worked in the past to maintain good progress review discipline includes:
- Make the business sponsors aware of the issues and discuss with them the importance of the disciplines and how to approach these issues
- Ensure the sponsors lead from the front in these reviews and actively coach them when needed (to the point that they can then coach their teams as well)
- Consider having the sponsor’s manager also attend the progress review on occasion and provide additional coaching
- Use small process checks to ensure poor discipline is visually noticeable e.g., include an attendance trackers (‘name and shame’ approach) – red/green to denote if someone attended or not. Tracking by week is quite effective to visibly show who are the repeat offenders. And, as a quick aside, attendance means that the person was there at the start (or within 2 minutes of start time)
- Use process confirmations on the efficiency and effectiveness of progress reviews. This requires someone to independently manually review the meeting in real time and then give feedback on both the efficiency and effectiveness of the meeting; this is a great way of providing coaching to all the attendees in the progress reviews (e.g., what worked well, what didn’t and tips for improvement) – this could be someone from the Improvement team or the Sponsor’s manager
These are all tried and tested – pick some or all of them as needed 😊.
Conclusion
In summary, to have always-on change capability in your organization so that you are able to manage and implement both major Transformations and Continuous Improvement programs, then you need good change process disciplines – requiring both you and the organization’s leaders to understand what good looks like and coach people towards those standards on an on-going basis.
Hopefully, as a Chief Transformation Office, Head of Improvement or Business Excellence or even just leading Business Improvement in your organization, you’ll both recognize when some of these failure modes are occurring and also know how to overcome them.