Last week Microsoft's Chief Executive Steve Ballmer announced sweeping organizational changes. This radical restructuring is an attempt to drive innovation by breaking down organizational silos. As Ballmer noted, “To execute, we’ve got to move from multiple Microsofts to one Microsoft.”
Over the course of the past 25 years our change management consulting work has exposed us to a lot of misconceptions about what works and what doesn't work when it comes to implementing projects. We recently shared these 4 myths at the HIMSS (Health Information Management Systems Society) International Conference and found that the myths are alive and well in the world of Healthcare IT project implementations.
One of the common strategic changes we see in our change management consulting is the attempt to implement EPMOs (Enterprise Program Management Offices.) Why the interest in EPMOs? What problem is the EPMO trying to solve? For many organizations, the establishment of an EPMO is an attempt to drive greater collaboration across the enterprise and overcome the traditional silos. This is an admirable objective, but what does it take from a change management consulting perspective?
If you are serving in an internal change management consulting role, there is great value in having a set of core principles guide your way. We tell our clients that the AIM change management methodology principles are like an electronic dashboard in your car; if your windshield wiper fluid is low, you react one way. If your Check Engine light appears, that is an entirely different matter!
What falls under the change leader job description in best practice change management consulting? Here's a role description we use in our own change management consulting where we are applying the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) to complex, large-scale changes in our client organizations:
While many organizations include some of the necessary people-side project management deliverables some of the time, it’s not a consistently-applied change management consulting process. As a result, implementation success is spotty. While attempts are made to either “bolt on” a human “change management” plan at the end of the technical plan, or to run a human plan in parallel, the best practice is a blended plan.
Over more than two decades of change management consulting, we have had the opportunity to observe what works well in implementation—and where the traps are that get in the way of project success. It’s a long-term field-research opportunity, and includes data from leading global organizations. Here’s what the research from our change management consulting tells us are 7 of the most common “bumps in the road” that cause projects to de-rail.
