The current economic climate has spurred many organizations to assess their own strategic weaknesses while also identifying competitive market opportunities. This is leading to a renewed emphasis on business transformation activities. By its nature, business transformation is strategic, but it can only be successful when it is linked to systematically applied organizational change management processes.
If your organization is going to engage in large scale, complex organizational change that involves multiple work streams, you will not achieve your business change objectives without a structured, tactical process that can be applied across these multiple projects. Business transformation programs typically involve projects with significant interdependencies, and must be managed on an enterprise-wide basis. For this reason, it is extremely useful to have a robust, systematic organizational change management methodology (like AIM—the Accelerated Implementation Methodology) that can be applied through all phases of the programmatic lifecycle.
Remember that it isn’t sufficient to just install business transformation changes—these changes need to be implemented through to behavior change and behavior adoption if the organization is going to achieve project return on investment. Business transformation initiatives that focus solely on business and technical objectives but ignore or inadequately address the human and cultural objectives, will fall short. You’ll pay for this in resistance to the business transformation changes that will slow you down or even cause failure.
Take a Systemic and Systematic Approach to Business Transformation Implementation
It’s common to assume that a great communication plan is the centerpiece for addressing the human and cultural elements of business transformation. Business Sponsors and the Project team invest heavily in branding, a program website, town hall meetings, and email updates. Communication alone, and certainly these “top-down” communication activities ignore the fact that behavior change and adoption require reinforcement and active resistance management by business sponsors who are trained and prepared with an arsenal of tools and tactics.
So while business transformation takes a large-scale, systemic approach to changing the business processes and technology, the people aspects are addressed on a small-scale, ad-hoc basis with managers all doing things their own way, in their own language, with their own perspectives and biases. As a result, implementation is spotty, with some areas achieving behavior change and adoption, and other areas falling short. Pockets of resistance form, dragging the transformational effort along.
Four Recommended Actions for Business Transformation Success
Since the business transformation program typically involves multiple projects and waves, the unmanaged people aspects negatively impact not only that specific project, but also put the succeeding or parallel projects at risk.
What to do?
- Educate your highest level leadership that installation success is not the same as implementation success
- Approach the human and cultural elements with the same methodic and systemic approach that you are taking on the business and technical side
- Develop an implementation plan for the business transformation program that is integrated into the technical project plan
- Identify all of your sponsors and change agents across the enterprise who will be impacted by these business transformation changes, and educate them on their roles, responsibilities, and available tactics that can be used in promoting readiness, managing resistance, and applying reinforcement at the local level
By following a systematic approach to the human and cultural elements of business transformation, you will dramatically increase the likelihood of success. The relative costs are low, and the potential reward is enormous.
