It would be nice to think that each new project begins with a clean slate.  An energized team.  A vision of the future state.  And in the ideal world, all the resources needed for success.  But the reality is that projects don’t take place in isolation.  Your past history can have a major impact on future success.  If you can identify trends and themes of the past, you can pinpoint the potential barriers to success, and take a data-based approach to mitigating risk. 

The Value of Assessing Past History

The importance of analysis is widely applied across many fields-- market research for product launches, the discovery phase in litigation, or tests and diagnostics to determine medical diagnoses.  In each of these cases, analysis provides useful clues. Through the data-gathering process, we focus our resources and energy in the areas where they will do the most good.

The same is true in projects, because your past history of implementation can provide important insight into the future.  The patterns of the past are doomed to be repeated, barring some intervening event.  Past failures are long-remembered by the targets of the change, and each failure geometrically impacts leadership’s credibility. 

For this reason, IMA consultants employ the Implementation History Assessment (IHA) as a first step to understanding the climate for change and to identify the systemic weaknesses in an organization.  The Assessment is a 50 question survey, with questions aligned to each of the ten steps of the Accelerating Implementation Methodology.

The Implementation Climate

The information we gain from the IHA helps us in a number of ways, especially when we look at the data in the context of all the other changes going on in the organization at the same time.  By looking at the history of implementation, and understanding the current levels of organizational stress (which in organizations today is uniformly very high), we are able get a good picture of the climate for change.  The climate assessment enables us to:

• Estimate the degree of difficulty we are likely to encounter in implementation
• Determine the amount of effort and investment needed
• Predict points of resistance
• Form strategies to manage resistance
• Develop awareness
• Assess the corresponding impact of this change with other events going on in the organization

We know that if we are dealing with an organization in high stress and with an unsuccessful history, we’ll need more resources and time to create readiness for the change.  If the organization is under low stress (meaning few initiatives competing for resources, time and attention) and has a successful history, fewer resources and less time will be required to create readiness. 

By taking a data-based approach, we can be better positioned to use our resources wisely, increase the likelihood of implementation success, and accelerate Return on Investment.

For more information on how to conduct an Implementation History Assessment in your organization, contact Paula Alsher, Vice President, Client Solutions at 866-996-7788 or by email at paula.alsher@imaworldwide.com.