Previous posts have talked about the need for a picture which helps people to put all the management pieces together for big picture results.
Here’s a small example:
This puzzle describes a common transformation pattern – moving to a multi-channel customer service delivery model. You find this in government and commercial organisations when cost pressures have led to a reduction in service quality at call centres and over the counter offices. Customer complaints increase, performance targets are missed and costs rise further trying to patch up the situation. At some point, a decision is made to invest in new technology which will enable customers to get and provide information without having to deal with human beings from the organisation.
Multi-channel service delivery can be a great capability but to implement this effectively, there are a lot of pieces which need to fit together. The high level strategy must survive being passed to the program office and being split into multiple projects. The projects will change business processes across multiple operating areas and individual jobs will be redesigned as tasks are reconfigured to suit multiple activity contexts. The technology which underpins this strategy must support the change life cycle and provide a scalable, robust capability which compliments human centric services to meet customer’s expectations. Expectations which have been set by people who sit outside technology, in the marketing and communications area. Against this backdrop where pieces of the business are being reconfigured while they’re still moving, performance measures will be relied upon to track progress against the desired strategic objectives. The measurement systems will also require changes and this will impact the incentives of the people who are, at least in theory, responsible for the compounding effects of the change.
In my experience of more than a hundred small to large transformation programs ($millions up to $billions), I’ve never seen this kind of picture be fully understood by all the stakeholders in the program. Stakeholders focus on the pieces which they are responsible for and, at best, how some of those pieces might fit with the adjoining responsibility. Outstanding executive leadership can achieve the near impossible task of herding the flock towards a successful outcome, but for the other 99% of organisations, programs of this scope rarely live up to the initial expectations in the eyes of the internal or external customers.
Today, when I have an opportunity to help people see this kind of perspective, it’s usually because an unpleasant surprise occurs when some glaring piece of evidence arises to show that the performance feedback has been giving a false impression and something which seemed to be a bit of a worry turns out instead to be a genuine catastrophe. By conducting a strategy trace, you start to see the gaps between the pieces and it becomes quite easy to show that the puzzle is never going to result in the picture on the outside of the box. The best outcome at this stage is to cancel or fundamentally reconfigure the program at tremendous financial and opportunity cost.
If you’re starting to put this kind of puzzle together in your organisation, see what you can do to keep the picture visible to everyone working at the table and use governance mechanisms to help identify pieces which don’t fit before it’s too late!
