Podcast 8 - Strategic Change Initiatives

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A full transcript of this podcast is reproduced below.

Hello, I’m Rob Lambert. I’m a senior lecturer here at Cranfield School of Management. This podcast is concerned with the criticality of aligning and filtering strategic change initiatives. Here at Cranfield I am particularly interested in helping organisations successfully execute their strategic change initiatives.

Delivering business strategy and the associated goals is something many businesses find problematic. Yet in today’s turbulent economic climate organisations need to ensure any investment of scarce resources delivers the expected outcomes and improvements that their shareholders and stakeholders are looking for.

When it comes to strategic change initiatives much of the literature on change focuses on executing a single change initiative. They’re impacted by other change initiatives that compete for resources and management time. As well as this, organisations have to manage today, in terms of delivering today’s performance, today’s goals, and deliver tomorrow. This provides a conundrum for many organisations.

Our recent research suggests that critical to successful execution of change is the need to be better able to align, filter and prioritise change initiatives.

If organisations can do this it should help stop many of the issues that they have with change overload, stress, and the failures that are endemic in many organisations in terms of strategic change. This is critical to the success of future organisations.

In order to better align and filter their change initiatives organisations need to address several key issues. Firstly, whilst all organisations, yes, have a vision, a strategic statement and so on, what is really critical is the need for a statement of their strategic goals, in terms of key performance indicators (KPIs) or balance scorecard metrics. These will provide a focus to each change initiative and act as a basis for alignment.

As well as having a clear set of KPIs or balance scorecard indicators that people need to align to, organisations need a consistent way of presenting their change initiatives.

We find written business cases are not always exciting and engaging and perhaps not the best way to communicate what the change is about. Here at Cranfield we developed very strongly a visualisation of a change initiative through our benefits networks.

The benefits network starts with the vision of the organisation, for each vision it tries to identify clear quantified business benefits, with clear metrics and outcomes i.e. the success criteria that the organisation is looking for out of that change initiative.

In order to deliver each outcome the organisation needs to say ‘well what business processes, business activities are involved, how do they need to change and do they need any IT support?

Our view of developing a visual view of the change is really critical. We find it helps with stakeholder buying, getting shared understanding of the change early on.

Having got this visualisation, it is much easier to produce a business case. Our research suggests that developing realistic and complete business cases is difficult for many organisations. In fact many business cases are inadequate, particularly in terms of the clarity of business benefits, in terms of defining the level they can be monitored and tracked and actually provide clarity that they’ve been achieved.

The change implications in terms of business change. Are they clear in business cases? Our actual experience is that they are not.

Finally, the internal resources - key business people - that are needed to deliver that change. Quite often in business they are not clearly defined in terms of the number of days, the particular types of people you need available.

These people are key because they are your business people who are delivering today’s performance but you also need them on your change initiatives.

Our experience is that business cases are often a request for capital so that the team can start the project, which is rather strange because the business case should be the foundation for which the project is delivered.

Having a good clear business case allows organisations to better develop a prioritised change portfolio. This change portfolio needs to be understood and agreed by the leadership team. In order to get a realistic business case, in order to get an agreed change portfolio requires openness and honesty and actually shared values across people within an organisation.

Having developed a changed portfolio is a good basis to move on into execution. However, once organisations move in to execution of these changes then more issues occur. Many organisations do not have the mechanism for balancing resources.

Finally, organisations are complex. They have to deliver today’s results as well as create tomorrow. The environment is getting increasingly competitive and more difficult. Managing change initiatives successfully is critical and requires organisation to review its processes for developing a portfolio of change.

The leadership team of an organisation need to owe the alignment process and prioritisation process as the ability to deliver the strategic priorities and promises of today is critical for both their and the organisation’s long-term success.

Rob Lambert is a Senior Lecturer in Management Information Systems at Cranfield School of Management, specialising in management programmes aimed at improving managerial and organisational performance, particularly taking a corporate cross functional view of organisations. Lambert has been Director of the Cranfield General Management Programme for Specialists and then the Cranfield Senior Management Programme and is particularly interested in the role of Information Systems in achieving corporate objectives and acts as a consultant to a number of multi-national organisations in the telecommunication, pharmaceutical and oil industries.

www.som.cranfield.ac.uk