Making change work

Back in mid-May I listened to Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, talk about the end of the "nice" decade and the real threat of a serious downturn. Of course, this will make financial directors look even harder at current and future projects investment, but when they do, they might also examine the subject of project overload and might discover new ways to create cost efficiencies and value.

What is project overload? 'Portfolio overload' might be a better term, as it is often not about just one project inflicting too much change upon an organisation, but too many projects – a portfolio - imposing too much change altogether. Managing this portfolio and the level of transformation it brings is much harder to achieve than managing the effects that only one project imparts on an organisation. So why is this the case?

How portfolio overload can happen

A project manager should be aware of how his or her project will bring about change in an organisation as they are overseeing this process. For example, a project manager in a retail company may well be aware of how much activity and related disruption an assignment is going to have on the stores before, during and after implementation. Based on this 'known' level of change the project manager can plan accordingly. Appropriate communications and training can be set up to ensure that any barriers – and they always exist – are overcome, the change is accepted and the project becomes a success.

What the individual project manager may not be aware of is all the other improvements and initiatives being planned in other parts of an organisation that will also generate change. For example, a retailer may be replacing point of sale software and plan for that by training the staff in the new system and ways of working. But it may not be aware that the HR department is implementing a new customer service scheme. If these projects hit the stores simultaneously then the staff will be faced with a barrage of new things to learn and absorb, over and above all the day-to-day operational developments that Head Office may demand.

It is common sense that if you try and alter too much too quickly then people will not be able to absorb the changes and react negatively. The barriers may actually be increased as yet another new initiative impacts the staff. The net result is that the change does not stick, project benefits are not realised and business value is not delivered. Not only that but the staff will become very suspicious of any new idea or programme in the future. So how does an organisation ensure that they are not burdening staff with too much, too soon?

Create a corporate change office

One way that I have seen work well is to form a corporate change office, which has an overview of all the change initiatives in an organisation. Its purpose is to work out when all these projects will hit different organisational units - e.g. finance, marketing, stores, etc - and evaluate the effect on staff of all these changes added together. The office then reports – usually to an FD - on the impact of all these activities. They can highlight areas requiring corrective action where they see too many projects implementing at the same time, carrying with it the risk of overloading staff and adversely affecting optimum performance.

They can recommend where to delay or defer projects in order to spread or smooth the impact of change. This may be unpalatable for the project manager who sees an 'outside agency' potentially creating delays, but in reality the whole organisation benefits by enabling all the improvements to happen and all the gains to be realised.

High calibre staff required

But beware: when the words 'programme' and 'change office' are used, some people think of administrators mechanically adding up plans and presenting them. The approach I am talking about needs a higher calibre of individual, preferably someone who has managed such programmes before. The reason being that it is not a mechanical, mathematical process of evaluating when change becomes overload: it is a matter of judgement based on an analysis of the right information.

Here is some evidence: a major retailer saw the point of introducing a change overload unit and gained undeniable value from it. A new management regime dropped the resource, but soon the organisation began to slip back into its former and overly pressurised state. The unit has since been re-established and is demonstrably helping the company to thrive.

At first glance, a corporate change office may seem like yet another overhead, but if the alternative is project overload resulting in wasted resources, poor performance and missed benefits, such a resource may prove to be a wise investment, especially if the economy starts to turn 'nasty'.

David Walton is managing director of project management experts Bestoutcome. His programme management assignments include ecommerce, IT transformational change, customer relationship management (CRM) and large-scale infrastructure implementations. Before founding the company six years ago, he spent eleven years as a management consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers and held IT management positions at the International Stock Exchange and Max Factor. He can be contacted at david.walton@bestoutcome.com