Inflexion Group Chair, Tim Shercliff, is a senior business executive and board level advisor with extensive experience in the technology and professional services sectors. Here he explains how a well-structured programme, with appropriate governance around execution, is essential to drive effective organisational change.
We’ve worked on implementing change in many organisations, always with a view to improving sustainable, profitable growth and usually around account-based growth. It’s a team sport, and it’s changed over the years to embrace a more agile approach, but some of the fundamentals are the same. And some of the trusted ways in which we structure our thinking and build, then execute a plan haven’t changed either.
Once you know where you’re going, you need a plan to get there, and you need to have the resources and governance in place to execute the plan.
We have developed a structured approach to help our clients build and execute their change programmes and realise their vision and benefits. This is shown in the figure below.
Our structured approach to change programmes
Starting with why
Lewis Carroll is quoted as saying: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” In business terms, this translates into having a clear vision about where you’d like to get to, often articulated as the North Star.
Sometimes, the need to change is driven by a crisis in the business. Niccolo Machiavelli is often credited with first saying: “Never waste an opportunity offered by a good crisis.” It’s easier to ask people to accept change when it’s obvious that something terrible is already or will soon happen if you carry on as you are. Businesses find it more difficult to make wholesale change when it is not staring them in the face and where the benefits need more careful construction. All this illustrates though, in the end, is that, as Simon Sinek has long argued, you have to ‘start with why.’
Building the plan
If you know why you need to change, the next part of building your plan is to describe accurately and concisely the scope of what needs to be done in order to bring about the change, documenting what is out of scope. When working with clients, we create programme objectives, define workstreams, which are logical groupings of the work and, within each workstream, define the deliverables that need to be created in order to deliver the programme objectives, getting down to detailing who will do the work and by when.
At this point we have a plan, but not the means to deliver it, so we turn next to the proven building blocks for successfully executing any plan. This means identifying the budget and resources needed; what steering groups, programme review boards and mechanisms will we put in place to manage the execution of the plan. We need to define our approach to delivery, agile or otherwise. Then, what are the risks, issues and dependencies that will potentially trip us up if we don’t manage them. And finally, how will we engage with key stakeholders and communicate more widely about the programme, to keep everyone supportive and helpful in resolving issues.
Making it happen
At Inflexion Group, we use Programme Definition Workshops (PDWs) to build the entire change plan, usually split into three logical sections around the why, what and how shown in in the figure above, with time in between to allow planning between each workshop. At the end of the PDWs, we will have jointly built a Programme Definition Report, which has all the detail needed for the plan to be successfully implemented.
However, having a plan and actually executing it successfully is not the same thing! So, to make a change, we need to mobilise resources, secure budgets, put our governance in place and effectively engage our stakeholders to make sure we actually do the work required and take the organisation with us.
If you’re realising you need to make a significant change to the way you approach account-based growth within your organisation and would like our help in structuring it as a successful programme, please reach out via info@inflexiongroup.com.
