Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” That’s why we find it rather puzzling when organizations initiate any type of change without a Change Implementation Plan.
In fact, after almost 40 years of hands-on Change Management Consulting and Training work, we contend Implementation Management Planning is arguably the single most important step to be taken when starting a new change project, whether it’s transformational in scope or a more modest change.
40 years. That’s how long Don Harrison, President and founder of IMA has been working in the Change Management industry. While some may joke he started when he was 5, Don has dedicated his entire career to implementing complex changes in organizations. His frequent application of this expertise to technology implementations, cultural changes, mergers and acquisitions, and business process initiatives has led to his popularity as a consultant and keynote speaker for national and international conferences. Plus he is really funny, and that helps!
Are you currently working on a transformational change? Maybe you are you going through an organizational re-design or implementing new technology. It could be a Shared Services implementation or a Lean Process Improvement. If you are involved in any strategic change where people will need to do things differently, you are likely starting to think about how you are going to build capacity.
Imagine you are driving 65 miles an hour along the highway and your “check engine” light comes on. What do you do? If that happened to us, we would pull over immediately and assess the situation. Would we have the same reaction if the “low windshield wiper fluid” light illuminated...definitely not.
Mergers and acquisitions are international news on a weekly basis. In fact, just this month alone, Anheuser-Busch InBev announced its acquisition of SABMiller in a deal worth over $100 billion dollars. In addition, Dell purchased EMC in a $67 billion dollar deal touted as one of the largest tech mergers ever. Whether we’re talking about multi-billion dollar deals such as these, or smaller ones, there is no doubt mergers mean change is coming for at least one of the organizations affected, and more likely than not... both of them.
No behavior change, no implementation. It’s a simple, but profound statement about the criticality of the human side of business projects, including transformational change initiatives. Right from the start, project teams must take a purposeful approach to identifying what the new behaviors are for the transformation. It’s why a foundation of IMA’s proprietary Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) is, “In order to achieve value realization, you must first identify the “human objectives” for your change.”
Organizations are experiencing an astounding rate of business change. Changes designed to improve market share, competitive advantage, operational efficiency and shareholder return have multiplied at an alarming rate—so many projects chasing too few resources. In short, everyone wants to get better, faster.
Jack Welch, retired Chairman of General Electric once said, “Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customer’s experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.” In fact, General Electric, one of the most successful Six Sigma users, once estimated achieving $10 billion savings in just the first five years of implementation. $10 billion dollars! That is nothing to sneeze at.
Remember what happened when you first joined your organization? You were probably given a handbook with all the formal policies and procedures. Did you find it helpful? Sure. But we are guessing after just a few days of working there, the "unwritten rules" that dictate how your organization really operates began to surface.
Managers play a major role in ensuring change happens. The more they know about best practices of change management, the easier this will be. However, in reality...they don’t really need to know it all.
