Whichever way we look at it, our culture almost certainly needs to change to manage change well.
The excellent AXELOS Management of Portfolios manual talks of allocating resources where they will be making the most strategic contribution. This means being able to put a ‘value’ on the strategic contribution of individual project and programme change initiatives, and a ‘value’ on our confidence in their ability to fulfill that contribution.
Today’s world sees all sorts of change management ‘waterfall’ and/or ‘agile’ approaches in action.
We are encouraged to manage changes such that benefits are prioritised and, if time boxes do not allow, deliver only the most important characteristics or features that will enable realisation of the ‘top’ benefits (e.g. the AXELOS PRINCE2 Agile manual).
We are also urged to constantly be vigilant for and leverage newly-identified benefits once the change initiative is underway, perhaps even justifying further funding in that initiative because of a new benefit when it becomes clear that the previously-declared benefits forecast can no longer be realized (e.g. the APMG-International Managing Benefits manual).
We are equally entreated to structure and punctuate our change initiative lifecycle(s) such that the change task is broken into chunks (stages, tranches, phases, time boxes, etc.). We then take a moment near the end of each chunk - the next lock-gate on the canal if you like - to review if the initiative is still on track to achieve the strategic contribution anticipated (see any of AXELOS’ PRINCE2, MSP, Management of Portfolios, or Management of Risk guides, or the APMG-International Managing Benefits manual).
But… all of this will only work if we as senior managers understand things change:
The prevailing strategy that we are setting constantly evolves because the environment of our organization is always in flux.
The initial forecast ‘promise’ of any change initiative (its Business Case) is the best estimate available, but is still ONLY AN ESTIMATE! That prediction of the future WILL (not may) change as things actually pan out.
The prevailing confidence in any strategic contribution from a change initiative is therefore going to also change over time. What is a sound investment today, may not represent the best place to allocate resources tomorrow.
The decision-making of our organization’s governance structures (from top to bottom) therefore needs to be adept and flexible, so that our limited resources can be mobilized where they are best able to make a difference.
If we senior managers do not set the terms for these decisions about priorities, then our staff - faced with only so many working hours in each day in which to get all their tasks done – will do so in our stead; and our staff may not make the same choice about what is their top task priority as their leaders.
We must be willing to state the value of investment at which the organization considers it is sensible to consider moving resources around. We must be willing to make decisions to do this; the amount of money already spent should not unduly influence our decision to switch off or not the funding tap.
This may be a new challenge for some of us. Some of us senior managers may need to change our worldview in order to manage our change portfolio as well as we manage our business-as-usual.