Creating a Value Delivery Machine - Part 3 of 3: Guiding Organizations through Change
Catastrophic failure introduced me to change management as a discipline. I was a member of the leadership team charged with radically transforming the enterprise practices and processes while deploying a broad ranging ERP platform. It was a multi-process, multi-phased, multi-year effort to radically improve the performance of a large multinational company. The program was so large that our team of vice presidents and directors, around 20 of us, were sized as its own function with hundreds of employees working full time on the effort. After over a year of discovery and design we were poised to launch the first phase. As we tend to do with these large efforts, we chose the “easiest” changes to deploy first. The expense and accounting processes were our most rigorously documented and well understood. So we believed that launching those processes first would be straight forward. Launch proved us wrong. The delivered capability proved unusable and was rolled back within days. Our executive leader was relieved of her duties and the reshuffle of our leadership team immediately followed. I was asked, well urged, to join a hastily assembled change management team to lead business readiness.
Guiding Organizations through Change
At the time I knew nothing about formal change management. I had led and delivered a number of sizable enterprise improvement programs and had delivered a couple of enterprise platforms as a program manager. For those programs we certainly had to align executive teams and navigate user needs, but we did it as a casual aside to the program delivery efforts. This transformational program was a significantly larger beast than anything I had previously led. The stakes were existential and the first phase failure ramped urgency to the extreme. I was pulled into a change management team led by a seasoned, masterful change manager who taught me everything I know about leading change management efforts with grace in the face of extreme circumstances. As we churned on the failure post mortem, using the change management lens, a picture emerged of failure of a competently built platform that failed due to lack of a comprehensive change management plan. What went wrong? To answer that question we need to better understand what change management is and what problems it addresses.
In the two previous articles we solutioned for value and structured the solution delivery program for success.
The change management effort is our final chapter in the value delivery spine, making this the final article in the ‘Creating a Value Delivery Machine’ series.