The first component of the change management playbook is integration leadership. The other components dig into what the integration leaders need to lead.

Stand Up Your Transition, Transformation, or Project Management Offices

Complex change management efforts through points of inflection like mergers and acquisitions or restructurings go better with people giving leaders leverage by managing the change processes. These people have different titles in different organizations. Here's one set of definitions:

Leaders inspire, enable, and empower others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose.

Deputies are second in command, empowered to act in their superiors' absence. As such, they are leaders themselves who may step in to manage some changes and processes.

Chiefs of staff give leaders increased leverage by managing them, priorities, programs, and projects, and communication. Where a deputy has some direct power, a chief of staff's power is all indirect as the voice of the leader.

A project management office (PMO) conceives potential programs and projects in line with enterprise-level priorities, helps prioritize and define those programs and projects with team charters, assembles resources, communicates and coordinates within and across programs and projects, facilitates key meetings, tracks milestones, analyzes results, and initiates appropriate process improvements.

Transformation, integration leader, chief transformation officers, as the M&A Leadership Council's Mark Herdon suggests,¹ manage chaos as the key point of contact, accelerate process by helping executive staff manage, architect success by providing focus and direction, and personally drive the change on major issues.

Going into more depth on the last three, starting with some definitions:

Enterprise-level priorities include ongoing strategic, organizational, and operational priorities and processes and the one or two most important enterprise-wide endeavors.

Programs are the main longer-term components of those priorities, generally tracked and managed monthly.

Projects are the subcomponents of programs, generally tracked and managed weekly.

Tasks are the actual work that rolls up into projects, programs, and priorities. These are generally tracked and managed at least daily by front-line supervisors.

Chief of Staff

The chief of staff gives the leader leverage by managing the leader; managing priorities, programs, and projects; and managing communication.

Project Management Office (PMO)

The PMO's role is different than that of a program or project manager. A program or project manager defines project-specific objectives and goals, gathers data, schedules tasks, and manages the program and project's costs, budgets, and resources to deliver agreed objectives and goals.

The PMO remit is broader: part information technology (IT), part planning, finance, risk management, and resourcing, collaborating to ensure that all projects are delivered with high quality and achieve their defined outcomes. This is achieved by mapping out project goals, defining processes, workflows, methodologies, resource constraints, and project scopes.

• Help prioritize programs and projects based on return on investment—both direct (on their own) and indirect (as part of a larger program, priority, or process). This prioritization is a nontrivial effort as scope is always a function of resources (including force multipliers like methods, tools, and technologies) and time. Need to allocate scarce existing resources to the most important programs and projects while working to create future capabilities to expand capacity down the road.
• Help assemble resources in line with programs and projects' scope and move them between programs and projects as appropriate as circumstances change.
• Help communicate and coordinate within and across teams and with senior management.
• Facilitate key meetings:
  • Send out meeting notices, agendas, and requests for input.
    • Meeting agendas should include:
      • The objective of the meeting
      • Meeting timing and methodology (live, video, audio)
      • What people are being asked to do in the meeting as a whole (decide, contribute, learn)
      • Meeting attendees, their role in the meeting by agenda item (decide, contribute, learn)
      • Prereads for attendees to digest in advance to help all decide, contribute, or learn.
  • Facilitate, keep time, and take notes during the meeting.
  • Distribute notes after meeting.
• Work behind the scenes to enable others to do the work with methods, tools, and technologies, as well as appropriate mentoring and coaching.
• Manage the milestone tracking process: sending out meeting notices and requests for input, following up to ensure delivery of required inputs, assembling and disseminating the inputs, facilitating milestone management meetings, issuing notes from the meetings.
• Analyze data, including project budgets, finances, risks, and resource allocation and provide appropriate reports in line with lean project management:
  • Strategize: Translate enterprise-level strategic priorities into actionable criteria.
  • Collect: Collect and develop new program and project initiatives driving continuous improvement and step-changes.
  • Decide: Make informed decisions on new program and project initiatives and program and project conflicts.
  • Execute: Put decisions to work and manage programs and projects to completion.

Team charters are great ways to get teams aligned around direction, resources, authority, and accountability as described in Chapter 9.

Transformation Officers

Most change agents don't survive their own change. Of course, the organization was at a point of inflection and needed to change. Of course, they were brought in to lead that change. But the change process is often so painful and so many “good” people have to go away that the change agent becomes an ongoing reminder of bad times. Stepping into the brighter future requires a new leader.

Thus, the job of most transformation leaders is to manage the change and then go away so the ongoing leadership can tell everyone how glad they are the transformation leaders are gone and get back to the new normal.

These transformation officers act as the leader's proxy or program or project manager as appropriate:

1. Serving as consumer or customer advocate, mapping current and aspirational customer journeys
2. Helping to design the change initiatives and new enterprise business model and architecture, providing focus and direction
3. Understanding capabilities and then pulling together and reallocating resources to the few most important initiatives
4. Leading the most important innovations and changes on major issues
5. Collaborating with all to move initiatives forward and managing chaos as key point of contact
6. Acting as the storyteller-in-chief and overcommunicating at every step of the way
7. Managing the finances and results to help executive staff manage

The transformation and integration team is made up of people with differential strengths:

• Head of transformation office—planning and execution
• Innovation
• Information
• Analytics
• Operations
• PMO
• + Subject matter experts: business processes, app development, GDPR, marketing, IoT, Cloud, technology architecture, user experience, story-telling, conversational brand strategy, forensics analysis, ethics compliance, digital product management