Change approach as an integrated part of continuous improvement
The Situation
A global manufacturing client delivering a vast amount of large scale transition, transformational and continuous improvement projects annually in the £Ms. Lacked consistency in delivery methods, embedding change, and struggled to demonstrate benefit realisation and justify the high costs.
The Task
I was brought in to help design and deploy a Change Methodology and Approach to create a standardised way to deliver change projects, achieve the desired results, and deliver benefits (as per business cases)
The Action / Approach
As part of the challenge I spend time with key stakeholders (sponsors and business owners) to understand their challenges, what lessons they have learned, and what they would perceive as being a success to deliver long-standing and sustainable change programmes. To extend my understanding I also engaged with impacted stakeholders to understand their perception on how historical projects have been delivered, their frustrations, and what aspirations they were aiming for. This provides a broad perspective and helps you look at a challenges through different lenses.
By following the principles of innovation you start by understanding the challenges, how to overcome these challenges and what a potential solution can look like. Through experimentation and validation steps it enabled me to test the ideas we have identified and helped create design principles to follow.
The Result
A Change Methodology and Approach was designed and implemented including training of not just change practitioners, but also business owners and their employees. The latter groups were critical, as we were fostering a culture of ownership, which is critical in continuous improvement where the business has to own its own operating model.
In addition to the framework I created a model that will help the client from capturing ideas, to qualify ideas (incl. experimentation, testing, and validating ideas) to ensure that they invest in the right projects. I also introduced a new model (starve gate review) to ensure that a project is called off if we don’t think the benefits can be delivered. This enabled the client to reinvest its funding into more healthy projects.
