Chapter 22

Ten Reasons Why Change Initiatives Go Wrong

In This Chapter

Getting the nature of your change initiative clear

Using programme management effectively

I find that change initiative is an extremely helpful term that's beautifully neutral and non-aligned. To me it simply means a programme or a stand-alone project. I use it when the organization I'm working with hasn't yet decided whether the initiative is to be run as a project or a programme, or when talking about a mix of programmes and stand-alone projects.

Before reading on, ask yourself why you think that organizations fail to deliver change initiatives (usually just known as projects). After you've had an opportunity to list some reasons, read through this chapter to see the ten problems that I identify.

Each of these problems is also a reason to use programme management.

Failing to Clarify whether a Change Initiative is a Programme or a Project

One crucial error to avoid, and a key element in change initiatives failing, is mistakenly labelling them as projects when they're better treated as programmes; that's really what this chapter is all about. Of course, you may also come across the opposite of this situation, where people want to call a simple project a programme. That just makes life complicated.

The following three tests are a logical way of taking an overall view of a change initiative and deciding whether to run it as a project or a programme:

• Does it affect a lot of people deeply?
• Can it be broken down into discrete projects?
• Will the senior managers sponsoring the change initiative be held accountable for realizing the benefits?

If you answer yes to all these questions, the organization is really better off running the change initiatives as a programme. If the answer to two out of three of the questions is yes, using programme management is still worth thinking about.

Gaining Insufficient Board-Level Support

People within an organization seem to want board-level sponsors for everything these days, but board members are busy and can't sponsor everything. After all, lots of important change initiatives are just projects delivering outputs that are required in the business, and so don't require board-level support.

But if a change initiative is sufficiently large and important to affect the achievement of strategic objectives, treating it as a programme is an ideal way to ensure that you have support and visibility at board level. As I describe in Chapter 9, the Senior Responsible Owner is a member of the Sponsoring Group, and the latter is just another name for the organization's board. That means that all programmes, if properly organized, have board-level support.

Suffering from Weak Leadership

If someone is reluctantly put in charge of a change initiative, that person can end up regarding it as a minor additional management task on top of business-as-usual work. Also, becoming overly involved in managing the change at the expense of leading the change is all too easy for those directing a change initiative.

By focusing on transition in business as usual, programme management makes clear the need for strong leadership (which I discuss in Chapter 17).

Forming Unrealistic Expectations of Organizational Capacity and Capability

After an organization recognises the need to change, it can sometimes press on with the change even though it doesn't have the capability – the necessary skills – and the capacity – enough people with those skills – to deliver the change successfully.

Programme management helps by describing a whole range of roles from Project Manager and member of the Business Change Team up to the Senior Responsible Owner, as well as describing the skills needed for each of these roles. In addition, a useful section of the Blueprint describes the capacity and capability needed in business as usual – the organization section. I look at the Blueprint in Chapter 6 and programme organization in Chapter 9.

Focusing Insufficiently on Benefits

When directing one or more projects, you may be tempted to focus down into the detail of project planning and control. I frequently see senior managers delving into the activity list of the project and ticking those activities off one by one.

Strategic change initiatives don't succeed because the projects are executed on time and on budget. They succeed when benefits flow. Programme management puts benefits first, which allows the programme to implement benefits-driven planning and benefit-led reporting. I cover these subjects in Chapter 15.

Working Without a Real Picture of Future Capability

Project management is about getting things done, placing the activities in the right sequence and then knocking them off, one by one. I think that project managers are born not made. But if you ask a number of project managers to work together in a complex change initiative they can all be happily executing activities that aren't pointing in the same direction. As a result, they can run conflicting projects in the absence of an overarching Blueprint.

In contrast, programme management brings the importance of the Blueprint to the fore and helps make sure that projects and business as usual are delivering a coherent future capability. Check out Chapter 6 for more details.

Muddling through with a Poor Vision

When you ask anyone involved to describe a change initiative's destination, they can all too easily descend into mind-numbing detail about the future or talk about what they're going to do to get to that destination. But neither overly detailed descriptions of the future nor activity lists engage and motivate stakeholders.

Programme management emphasises that the Vision needs to be a succinct and compelling description of the future. Flip to Chapter 5 for more details on the Vision.

Neglecting to Change the Culture

Projects are good at delivering outputs, whether they're tangible, such as a building, or intangible, such as computer software. But these elements are still just things that have been constructed and tested. Projects are less good at encouraging, stimulating and catalysing changes in the culture. Culture change is too subtle to be shown in graphs and charts: it happens in the hearts and minds of people bit by bit, one person a time, until a tipping point is reached and the changed attitudes become the norm.

Programme management doesn't try and squeeze culture change into the shape of a project. Instead it lets culture change happen in business as usual as part of transition. Check out Chapter 17 for how to lead people through change.

Allowing Stakeholders to be Unengaged

Treating people who use the output from a project as a single stakeholder group is beguilingly simple, as is giving them a bland, even meaningless, name such as ‘the users’. But in the real world you're going to have a whole mess of overlapping stakeholder groups with a variety of interests in what's being delivered. They have emotions ranging from enthusiasm or fear to ignorance or apathy.

Programme management encourages you to engage sympathetically with this diverse range of stakeholders and understand what they're interested in. You can only engage with those stakeholders effectively and talk to them in their own language when your programme understands their real interests, concerns and priorities. I discuss this subject in Chapter 14.

Drowning in Data

If your change initiative is just plain big, running it as a project is difficult even without considering all those above-the-line topics such as stakeholder engagement, benefits management, the Vision, the Blueprint and transition. The centre of a huge project, quite naturally, tries to keep a grip on everything down to the lowest level of detail. This type of project can easily drown in data.

For the most part, programmes are big and can also suffer from information overload if the programme core – the Programme Manager and the Programme Office – try to keep a grip on everything that's going on. Fortunately, programme management is a flexible beast. Experience shows that you can set up programme structures that have strong governance, without necessarily having detailed control of everything. As a result, those directing the programme can step out of the detail and see the wood and not the trees. Chapter 10 is a good place to start when you're considering how to summarise information in your programme.