Ready, Set, Go! Or not?

To get to the point of go-live your change programme has successfully completed the journey from concept, through design, development and testing, but it is about to be experienced by the most important people of all - your customers. How do you ensure that the organisation is ready?

I would imagine that everyone regularly involved with project work has had their share of difficult go-lives. Fortunately for most of us, few would have been quite as public as the disastrous opening day at Heathrow's Terminal 5 in March 2008 when problems included the staff being delayed when they couldn't get into the car park.

A further combination of computer and mechanical failures finally resulted in the cancellation of 34 flights and a lot of unhappy and frustrated passengers.

One of my own favourites was going live with our carefully tested system only to find that nothing, and I mean nothing, would work for the users. Several frenzied hours later we realised that every member of the testing team had been given system administrator privileges and this is why it all worked when they tried. Functional access corrected we were back on track.

Although not of the same scale, both anecdotes illustrate the need to complete testing in the "real world" and to have a thorough and methodical approach to assessing business readiness. This may include the following two processes:

Organisation Readiness Assessment (ORA): this is a detailed assessment based on predefined criteria by business area that must be met to ensure that the people and processes are ready to start live operations with minimal risk. The person or team conducting the ORA will carry out extensive interviews and will collate and review documentary evidence of all implementation work products such as plans, procedures, training documents and test scripts.

Go / No-Go Checkpoints: these are a series of checkpoint meetings held at key milestones. They must be attended by senior users and suppliers and will use the ORA report as input to assess readiness and approve the decision to continue. Risks, issues and mitigation will also be discussed.

The process of readiness assessment is often at risk due to the high degree of pressure to go live. The change programme is likely to have been going for some time now and the key stakeholders want to see the benefits realisation begin. It isn't always easy but this pressure must be resisted.

Amongst the consequences of not completing this exercise are that your customers may echo the sentiments of Sir George Martin in 2008 "When I came here I was very excited about the new terminal, but not now".

Written by Mike Gamble: Director JEM Retail Consultants

Difficult Decisions when Building a Team to Support Change Management

If your existing management team are fully occupied running the business then how can you second them into programme or project management positions?

I recently had a very interesting conversation with a senior Head of Business Transformation for a well known retailer. They are about to embark on a major change programme and his issue is that the existing management team are fully occupied with business as usual and consequently there is no possibility of them having the bandwidth to participate in the projects that will be required, even assuming that they have the requisite skills and experience.

His question: does he second people from the BAU team and back-fill them in the short term; or should he deliver the change programme using contractors or interim managers?

This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. It is also one that many organisations in the same circumstances will face and getting it right will be critical not only to the success of the change programme but also to benefits realisation and, I would suggest, retention of key employees.

There is no doubt that involving people from BAU will increase their commitment to the success of the change programme. It is also a unique opportunity to learn about new systems and processes before they become business critical. So involving the existing team is a priority.

On the other hand, they are the only people who understand how the current processes work and are therefore essential to business continuity. Bringing people in to temporarily replace them will involve a time consuming and ultimately throw away level of resource training people to use systems that now have a finite lifespan.

There is also the issue that BAU people are not used to project type work and gaining and being confident of those skills may add to the project critical path.

The answer may be to combine the two approaches. This would involve bringing external people into key programme and project roles to benefit from their expertise, but it would also necessitate being prepared to restructure some of the BAU roles and bringing in additional resource to allow BAU managers to be released to the programme, potentially on a part-time basis to act as subject matter experts for example.

There is no one right answer to this dilemma, but it is a fact that there is a natural resistance to change in most organisations. Involving your BAU team is a key way to break this down and ensure their motivation.

Written by Mike Gamble: JEM Retail Consultants