‘No Regrets’ transformation

You know the quote, “Change is inevitable, pain is optional!” As a Project Director, it was a choice I had to make on several occasions. Here’s my perspective on doing transformation with no regrets.

With the current energy market disruption, no clear agreed transition path and current inflation, the need for change is clear. But how businesses and their leaders make no-regret decisions that allow them to be dynamic and efficient can be challenging. Running a transformation program is often the solution to tap into value. But what does this really mean?

Transformation is such a broad term; there are organisational, digital and operational efficiency transformations and perhaps also smaller change programs that get labelled as transformation. One term used to better describe the type of transformation is ‘big “T”, little “t” transformation’. You might ask what I believe a little ‘t’ transformation is??Well, that might be something you need to decide for yourself, because I would suggest that what one organisation might experience as a high-impact intense change, another might see as a ‘business as usual’ implementation.

A transformation with a capital?T, which we define as an intense, organization-wide program to enhance performance?and?to boost organizational health. When such transformations succeed, they radically improve the important business drivers, such as topline growth, capital productivity, cost efficiency, operational effectiveness, customer satisfaction, and sales excellence.…. The reported failure rate of large-scale change programs has hovered around 70 percent over many years. McKinsey, Transformation with a capital t

When embarking on a big “T” transformation, while the desire for change is real, as stated there is significant operational performance and financial risk in such an exercise. What McKinsey omits to include in their list, is the immense cultural risk. How will staff be impacted through the transformation? It was in these circumstances where I consistently had to balance decisions around financial pain or human pain when the next change was required.

Here are my recommendations from experiences and discussions with other experts that will help you build a low-financial-risk, high people reward program that will have you and your leaders getting to the other side with ?‘no regrets’.*

Key Fundamentals – ‘must haves’ BEFORE you start

1.????Leadership Accountability - More than just alignment, the leadership team need to be sharing the accountability of success in the project with the project team. Being part of the regular cadence and sharing onus to being successful will ensure the appropriate prioritisation of important activities are not left for other urgent ones. Oh yes, and basically, they need to care equally about people and profits, because when you need to make the really hard decisions, and you will, they will understand and support you.

2.????Simple Objectives and Ambitious Targets - Keep your overarching objective, method and values simple. Use this as a guiding principle to everything you do.

Within my last project, E2E Project, the objective was “A better way for our people” with three focus areas: “Defining the Right work”, “Doing the work Right” and “Improving the Right work”. ?

Every activity was tied to this objective and the focus areas which was meaningful for the business to be engaged and open to change. It doesn’t mean the financial targets are not important, but normally with operational changes, financial targets are a lag indicator and often takes time to flow through the system. This project needed to win the trust of the workforce to be successful.

Be bold, think big and have a target that is so meaningful, it feels like if the whole business needs to contribute to enable success. In another example, I was doing a bike-riding fundraiser a few years back and had this idea to make it appealing for people to donate. When speaking to a senior executive about the idea the first thing he asked was how much is your target, I thought $5K was reasonable. His response was to make the target $20K and people will be drawn to supporting it because it’s so meaningful. We made over $25K that year and $50K the following. Be ambitious!!?

3.????Have resources available to do stuff – transformations are tough, fast paced, time consuming and intensive. Dedicated PMO resources are essential to give a program grunt to perform. Try to find a good balance of internal and external resources, as the internal will understand the landscape and current culture intimately while external will bring diversity of ideas and views. This balance gives you the best of both worlds and helps provide up-skilling and cross-skilling for the entire team.

‘No regret’ activities

1.????Gather and use Performance data that matters – Often there are two issues with performance data; firstly, that performance data and reporting is too high-level and focussed on mid-level management and above, and the other is that often we are using the wrong business performance measures that do not translate to the work being done. People, generally like to do a good job. Having performance data that has a direct line-of-sight to business performance and can be made available to the employees doing that work is essential (For example Schedulers who know what utilisation rates they are scheduling and their performance against these targets). This might not be available with current systems but there are some clever ways to capture and report performance that is tactical and cost effective.?

2.????Understand and grow the right Capability – Have you ever heard the response “because that’s how we’ve always done it”, or when someone new comes in and says, “we should do it this way because that’s how we did it in my old company”. Mapping the work being done against performance and the associated capability required to do that work (whether it is internal or external) is important. ?Then cross referencing this with best practice principles and current workforce competency enables a business to better understand where and how to tackle improvement.

3.????Apply good practice – I like the term ‘good practice’ as the target a business should aim for. In most cases it is unreasonable and uneconomic for businesses to strive for best practice which is often derived from the best practices across several companies. That is, with consideration for current state, customer expectations, business objectives and best practice what is the ‘good practice’ we are going to strive for and what associated capability should be to drive value. It is also an effective method for identifying where effort should be applied to innovation (I will talk about this in a future article).

4.????Rebuild Connected processes – this is an item that has fallen away as part of the global pandemic. Process steps that require multiple business units have become more transactional and less attention is given to how the output of one team impacts the input of another. Pain point analysis is an easy way to identify problem areas and building back the relationships and understanding of what teams require to be successful. Identifying key process steps and optimising the upstream and downstream connections can not only deliver financial benefits but build cultural resilience into the process.

5.????Make it every day – Change is not built overnight, and reinforcement, support and ongoing management is needed to build improvement. Team leaders, managers and regional managers need to understand their role in driving active performance-based conversations. Using the above four activities and supporting the business leadership to drive in a structured approach will embed changes. Think about including regular performance-based team meetings with a focus on items like celebrating successes, reviewing performance data, discussing contributing factors to good and not so good performance and enabling your team to have the space to act on potential hypotheses for improvement. ??

I have found these activities can be effective, low-cost and able to be scalable across the workforce. When applied well, there has been a ~15% reduction in addressable spend while maintaining (often improving) service quality.

However, the real kicker is that these form key principles of building a continuous improvement mindset that will enable future benefits.

They are good cultural building blocks and are strong fundamentals to do before commencing more disruptive change activities like larger digital changes and organisational restructures. There are also helpful tools out there that can help with diagnostics of current state maturity and identifying the potential size of prize.

*Now with a few disclaimers that I think need to be mentioned. These activities can generate enormous amounts of potential initiatives and not appropriately resourcing and supporting these activities can often reduce trust between management and the workforce. Be transparent with what you are taking on and understand the intent for driving value. Hopefully there is some sort of prioritisation tool already developed within the business that can be re-used.

This is not an exhaustive list and I welcome your thoughts and feedback. As mentioned, these are insights that I hope provoke discussion within your own business.

I will continue to share some further insights over the coming weeks, with my next piece focussing on building the ground swell of change by creating bottom-up activities that build ownership in the change. This will be a joint article written with , my colleague Erin White , Change & Communications Lead for E2E Project who will also provide some of her useful insights on this topic.

Take care, Troy

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