What's the end-goal for your enterprise-wide change? That may seem like an obvious question, but it's really not! In our thirty-plus years of change management consulting we've observed a common pattern of "premature project completion" across all types of organizational changes, including enterprise-wide change. 
Why do we say it is pre-mature, when you can confidently observe these things happening...
- the technology works
- the process is introduced
- the organization has been re-structured (again) and people are in "new boxes" on the chart
- the Lean/Six Sigma team is hard at work identifying root causes for problems and best solutions, with expressed support from executives
- the shared services model is in place
- the quality processes/customer centric strategies/safety procedures are launched via an extensive road show
But what has really changed? Possibly nothing!
The change has occurred at the veneer of the organization, but there has been no sustained behavior change-- or what we call adoption. Remember the principle from the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM)-- no behavior change---- no implementation! In other words, you get to launch or go live, but you haven't fully implemented true enterprise-wide change.
When we first introduced this concept to our change management consulting clients, the reaction was pretty universal. Most readily saw that there was a clear "installation mentality" in the organization. Frankly, this hasn't changed much.
And the reason is fairly simple--there continue to be powerful reasons for sustaining an installation mentality:
1. Scarce resources that drive the project team to be re-assigned to other projects prematurely. This is further complicated by the common tendency to commit what we call "fuzzy resources" to projects; that is, change agents that are assigned to spend just a small percentage of their time to multiple projects
2. Budgets that are developed based only on getting to the launch date for the enterprise-wide changes-- not on continuing on to ensure there is value realization/Return on Investment. This is particularly ironic because the data strongly and repeatedly tells us that the greatest risks of failed or stalled implementation are cultural and organizational elements (the human elements) that are not addressed with the same rigor as the technical and business objectives. But organizations that are data-based in other areas of the business still choose to over-look or minimize these risks!
3. Ease in quantifying installation, meaning that we can much more easily monitor and measure the key drivers of "installation"-- on time, on budget delivery. These are critically important measures, but insufficient if the end-goal is value realization
4. Performance measures that reinforce and reward both leaders and project teams for installation, not implementation. As organizations, we are seduced by the amount of installation activity going on "out there" rather than doing the hard work of changing behavior of sponsors.
The installation mentality is a cultural pattern, and leaders repeat the behaviors driving the installation culture because they are reinforced for it. "Every where you see a pattern, there either is or was a reward for it," says Don Harrison, the developer of AIM.
The reason that we tell our change management consulting clients that success is measured by achievement of all five success metrics (on time, on budget, all business, technical and human objectives met) is that all five are required to get to full implementation and value realization!
If you are embarking on complex, enterprise-wide change, are you installing or implementing?
