Pace Yourself: Business Change Without the Chaos

Do you remember Aesop's fable about the tortoise and the hare? It is obvious that the hare will win the race, but he takes a nap and the slow tortoise manages to pass him and win.

Long-distance runners often like to run "negative splits"... starting out more slowly then speeding up as the finish becomes closer. It can give a better overall time.

The right pace is faster than the wrong pace, even if sometimes the right pace appears... slower.

We still find it hard to find the right pace for large-scale business change programs. Programs are significant undertakings for an organization and have been chartered as a result of a significant strategic need. Therefore, they are costly in terms of money and effort and needed in terms of responding to stimulus that brought them into being. They are urgent.

If we progress too slowly then the business realities will change under our feet, we won't get the return on the investment we want and we might not get the result we want. That's really bad as we probably spent a lot of money and there was a really good reason to execute the program.

If we progress too quickly then chaos may ensue. The capacity of the program team to manage and deliver the program might be overwhelmed, resulting in incoherent capabilities and change approach. The capacity of the business organization to absorb the changes and transition to the new way of working might be exceeded, which will harm the business and customers.

The path to achieving the vision may also be unclear. There could be different approaches, with different impacts, costs and risks. We may simply want to try some different approaches and then move forward from a position of knowledge rather than hope.

So what do we do? We have to manage the tension between speed and control.

Tranches and Landing Points

I like the Managing Successful Programs framework.

I like it because it grew out of studies of the main reasons that large programs succeed or fail and I find that the issues it seeks to address match my experiences as a Program Manager. It gives practical approaches to minimize the likelihood of those issues making your program fail.

In MSP, one element of finding the right pace is to get to the end state via a series of discrete iterations, called Tranches, each of which takes the business to a coherent Landing Point. This is an important concept. If we take the organization through a never-ending period of change and instability then change fatigue sets in and we don't get adoption. We might even get resistance. 

In the blog about Target Operating Models (Where Are We Going Again?) I suggested that the projects we create and execute as part of a program spring from the gap between the current way of working (Current State) and the new ways of working (Target Operating Model). Well, we don't have to close that gap all at once.

A Landing Point provides a useful control point were we have brought together a coherent set of capabilities and the change management activities needed to embed the use of those capabilities into a new way of working for the organization. Think of a Landing Point as an interim Operating Model that hangs together even if it is not the end-point. Critically, it offers a space where we can operate in a stable mode for as long as we choose. This space can be used to gather learnings that will inform the next tranche, or to pause or stop the program if we want.

Let's look at a hypothetical example:

Here we have a hypothetical CRM deployment. We plan to deploy CRM across all our Sales Teams, updating Sales Processes as we go to respond to changes in our market and to take advantage of established Sales CRM best practices. When we have done that we can take advantage of enterprise insights that can be gained from running AI-enabled analytics embedded in the CRM.

But that is a lot all at once.

The word "tranche", meaning a portion of something, comes from Old French. It is still used in French today to mean "slice". We can slice up our business change into useful sections that give us control as a program team, an absorbable pace as a business and a means of tuning our next steps to take account of what we collectively learned from the last slice. Critically, we could shut up shop and stop, if our business case is no longer valid, there are other organizational priorities, or a significant external change occurred.

In the diagram above we have chartered 5 project tracks:

• Data migration, CRM capability delivery and Training and Change Management happen for each tranche. They will do something different in each tranche.
• Sales Process Redesign starts at the beginning but does not implement until the end of Tranche 2. This allows us to boldly update our ways of working with the benefit of learning from and citing successful examples from Tranche 1.
• Enterprise Analytics starts later and does not implement until the end of Tranche 3. This enables us to reduce costs by not ramping the team until we need to, intercepting the availability of mature data and the new global sales process.

Our Landing Points then, are:

• A single BU pilot to land and learn, establish proof points, get the team up and running, learn where the problems are before we go too wide so we can minimize them
• A global deployment with a new sales processes. We make sure before we start this tranche that we have operated in Landing Point 1 for long enough to build confidence
• An optimization tranche where we incorporate learnings from the last tranche to smooth operations and reap the rewards.

This is just an example - there will be other ways to slice this program based on our priorities and intended benefits. What works best in one organization will be different for another as the gap between current state and the Target Operating Model will be different.

What has worked for you?

If you would like to talk through tranching your current Business Information Systems Program then please reach out on LinkedIn, or view my services at fieldenablement.com

By the way, the US Library of Congress has a charming, illustrated collection of Aesop's Fables. 

Gareth