Better Program and Change Management

Running large scale change programs is hard. I believe there is a more impactful and more efficient way to manage these types of programs that reduces cost of ownership and operation, provides better core management tools, and puts more control and meaningful insights into the hands of business stakeholders.

Scaling Towards Large Change Programs

When a business change program starts to get large, the vast array of deliverables, work streams, stakeholders, silo-ed agendas, resources, assets, suppliers, vendors, assumptions, risks, and dependencies will become complex, non-linear and unwieldy very quickly. That’s a hard problem to wrestle with, and it is very challenging to optimize resources, assets, timelines, budgets and delivery against business outcomes across a multi-stakeholder environment. 

Change Is Constant. Embrace Uncertainty.

So while managing and optimizing all of these dimensions is challenging in of itself, the minute you baseline a program plan, it WILL change and you WILL need to re-plan, re-negotiate and re-commit to a new set of plans. Rinse. Repeat. Again, and again. This continuous re-planning is extremely time-consuming and inefficient. It really can be very painful to manage all of this and be in control at all times. So, you need to prepare for and embrace change and uncertainty from the get-go.

What Does It Take ?

Program and change management requires the continuous management and balancing of priorities, changes, risk and delivery of value. You need a detailed understanding of the business, its operational controls and processes, its market and regulations, its customers and their personas, how to use data and technology, and how to integrate solutions across the enterprise. You need to be able to model, understand and engage different business groups, multiple stakeholders and staff, partners, contractors and suppliers, and how their respective performance affects your ability to execute the program. And you need to do that in a way that is fair, balanced, constructive while providing transparency. You need need to be data-driven and have the right tools and analytics at your disposal to measure performance, quality, budgets and business outcomes. And with data, of course, you require control for consistency, version, quality, referential integrity and access.

All of this is challenging to get right and requires a comprehensive platform to bring together many of these elements.  And current tools and approaches across industries do not address these challenges in a meaningful and efficient manner.

So, how do you do all of this well ?

How efficiently can it be done, and how do you minimize the overheard of running a large program ?

How do you understand all the possible scenarios of how to execute the program ?

How do you know that you have optimized all of your resources (money, people, assets, opportunities) ?

What are your contingencies ?

Do you know your risks and their impact across all dependencies ?

Do you truly understand the impact of your commercial contracts on the capital and operational expenditure of your portfolio ?

These are all questions that myself and colleagues at IDE-International have been helping clients answer for the past 20 years. We believe there is a set of fundamental best practices and core capabilities that are needed to truly execute large scale change programs effectively. Let’s start with the fundamental principles that are need to be embraced and thought about from program inception through delivery:

FOCUS ON VALUE AND EFFICIENCY

• Focus on strategic outcomes, but balance with tactical wins to validate plans.

• Use data to find opportunities, drive decisions, and measure results.

• Look for ways to do more with less and to understand how budget is being spent.

COLLABORATION & COMMUNICATION

• Have a platform and process to enable an open and inclusive community of stakeholders and teams.

• Provide clear, data-driven communication.

• Balance compliance (controls) with collaboration to get things done.

EMBRACE CHANGE AND UNCERTAINTY

• Set yourself up to be nimble and responsive : change will happen, embrace uncertainty.

• Have solid decision and risk assessment tools.

• Have tools that allow for sensitivity analysis, scenario comparison.

• Understand the various paths and options to make pragmatic decisions.

ALIGNED DECISION-MAKING

• Use data to inform business decisions.

• Provide multi-stakeholder and team views and pivots of portfolio/program data.

• Ensure to maximize transparency across data, and decision making process on that data.

• Relate decisions back to milestones, performance and governance controls.

Core Capabilities

It is challenging to have one-size-fits-all approach to running different portfolios and programs across an enterprise, particularly with the need to support business leaders, program management, procurement and commercial, finance and resourcing, amongst other user types. Meanwhile, there is the need for formality, control and transparency when it comes to dealing with the dynamics of change, re-planning and risk management across stakeholders.

We believe we have found that balance by a) being pragmatic about what is core to a program manager’s (and their stakeholders’) needs, b) allowing a reasonable degree of user-driven configuration, and c) ensuring that we do not reinvent the wheel when it comes to low-level project and task management activities. Indeed, there is a plethora of good products in the market that services the project / issues / task / expenses / time management functions well. (There are also plenty of service providers who will gladly hand-roll this for you as well for a nice looking check or cheque !)

So, what are the core capabilities that a large scale program needs to support these fundamental principles, and allow program directors to answer the questions above ?

MANAGE EXECUTION RISK

• Being able to model risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies and their impacts, severities and mitigation strategies against business outcomes.

• Understanding risks, issues and blockers in the context of delivery so that you have an integrated view of where, why and how risks are occurring and what their impact will be across the program.

• Full contract and supplier model so that you can understand compliance, expenditure, and performance of your commercial contractual environment and then to ensure that you can optimize those contracts for the appropriate business outcome.

• Better risk metrics across different dimensions such as stakeholders, programs, organizational groups, risk types and business strategies.

CONTROL CHANGE

• Having the transparency, insights and metrics to understand where change is occurring. Whether it is from updated business priorities, changing market conditions, new regulations, project slippage, emergent scope, realization of risks, or invalidation of assumptions, the stakeholders need to be able to have a holistic view of their world.

• Being able to direct the appropriate level of data and insights to key stakeholders (or committees) to make the appropriate decisions or recommendations.

• Having proper auditing and (entitlement-driven) workflow and alerts around changes to drive action.

REAL-TIME SCENARIO PLANNING

• The ability to automatically create scenarios to contemplate and compare the effects of change.

• Being able to “solve for” different outcomes such as time to market, minimization of cost, business benefit (ROI), etc.

AUTO-IDENTIFICATION, AUTO-BALANCING AND OPTIMIZATION OF RESOURCE GAPS, CONSTRAINTS AND SURPLUSES

• Modeling the demand for resources, the available supply and where there are shortfalls or mismatches.

• Being able to perform “What-If” scenarios such as “What is the impact on a project and program if I direct more resources to this project?”, “If I equally distribute resources across my top five projects, what will happen to my timelines”, or “What if I take out my discretionary projects?”

• Use algorithms to automatically identify resourcing issues, and to auto-generate and propose a number of alternate solutions for you to consider and compare.

DELIVERABLE DEPENDENCY AND ASSUMPTION MANAGEMENT

• Having a cross-program dependency model across deliverables, risks, contracts, resources, suppliers, etc is critical to knowing where the delivery engine is going to seize up !

• Being able to quantify or measure the impacts of non-performance, and to map out potential paths to mitigate, deal with, or manage risks.

• Path dependent analytics such as critical path (chain) analytics to understand inter-dependencies between deliverables, contracts, suppliers and how their performance, or lack thereof, impacts everything across the program.

  
  

INTEGRATION WITH PROJECT MANAGEMENT ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

• Be able to import / export to and from common tools like Excel, MS Project, Jira, Confluence, etc.

• Leverage the data and meta-data in HR, Finance, Billing and other enterprise systems.

• Integrate with time and task tracking systems.

Reduce Cost. Have Better Insights. Get More Control.

We believe these key capabilities have not historically been properly catered for in the market by a single platform to holistically run a large change transformation project. That is the genesis of why we have developed what we think is a better and more industrial solution, PRIMED.

Imagine being able to take a more holistic view across your program: different views, scenarios and options to consider while dealing with and controlling change, risk and delivery ?

Reduce the cost of ownership and operation of a program by offering more compelling and appropriate functionality to run the program, while reducing the human workload to building and operating the system, ie less consultants billing on your program for years. We give YOU more control, and puts the tools and insights into your and your stakeholders and partners’ hands.