iProCon Insight - Latest Thinking

Demystifying change management for IT projects – Part I
Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Most project owners and managers by now have recognised good Change Management as a crucial success factor for any systems implementation project. People talk a lot about it. However, looking around, I can’t see very much done about it, let alone done successfully. Why is that so?

I found that one reason is most people are aiming to high, when thinking “Change Management” and then quietly abandon a task that’s beyond their capabilities and budget, but they can’t admit it. In other cases, “Change Management” is seen as a fluffy intangible exercise for the weak at heart that mustn’t be allowed to take resources away from designing processes or programming reports and web dynpros. These people give it about the same priority as exhibiting pieces of art in the project room.

In both cases, “Change Management” is only seen as the really big thing few people actually are able to get right: engaging the whole workforce, big communication programmes, changing people’s mindsets, changing values, cultural change. This is all very important and may be necessary for some projects. However, this is usually the wrong level to attack change management for the average IT project, because:

  • These issues need to be dealt with in a larger context considering the strategy and culture of the organisation as a whole
  • This is nothing to deal with as an afterthought during a systems implementation without extra resources
  • You need a dedicated expert in change and organisational culture to get it right. The average IT project manager will have a different focus in his or her skills set
  • With a lack of time, skills and context, we find many managers talking about the magical things around change management, but to no avail.
Therefore it is much more sensible and effective to focus on the basics. If you get these basic right, you’ll beat 80% of IT projects already and if you don’t all the magic of motivational speeches and messing around with culture won’t makeup for it. In this blog we want to present a few straightforward and common sense steps you can take to improve on the change management side of your project without being a business transformation guru.

One thing that always strikes me is that project managers often suggest they are managing change, but cannot tell me what exactly the change is they are allegedly managing. If you want to mitigate negative impact and exploit positive impact an IT project has on all parties affected, it would seem common sense to start with the question “What exactly is changing for these people?”.

Therefore the easiest and most natural step is: keeping track of process changes
It’s as simple as that: create a table somewhere to be accessed by your project team and make sure that, if anything is going to change in the way users will do their job in the future, it is tracked in this table. Here is one simple example showing how we track changes in our cherished project wiki (based on confluence):

Then use the information collected to

  • Get an overview of the process impact to see, whether it really makes sense
  • Communicate (and maybe get approval for, if not yet done) process changes
  • Show benefits counterbalancing any unpleasant changes people may have to get buy in
  • Train those affected by process changes, where necessary
  • Amend any documentation, including, but not limited to user handbook, auditing information, user helpdesk guidelines, etc.
  • Create any other preconditions require for these process changes to take effect with minimal distress for those affected
This is not a lot of extra work at all, but will safe you loads of effort.
Always remember: if you want to get buy in for change from an individual, you must be able to answer the simple question “What does this mean for me?”.

In reality, it may not be as straightforward as it seems for two reasons:
  • Getting the project team to keep track of all changes may require some change in attitude already. But here you are dealing with a limited group of people and a small change, and one you can easily demonstrate the benefits.
  • There’s still some management skill required to use the information in the way recommended above, but to have the list of changes is the crucial first step and the results will definitely be better than the results of managing an unknown or vaguely known change
If you don’t yet believe in the merits of such a simple process, think about your last project and about resistance and complaints (large scale and small) or rework you had. How much of this would have been avoidable, if you, your project team and all those affected by any changes had had a clear, shared understanding of all changes?

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iProCon Friday Management Memo
Friday, April 16, 2010
some food for thought on a Friday afternoon: "People join companies, but they leave managers." So, you can call for corporate to improve employer branding, but you may only have yourself to blame for high turnover rates in your team.
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Engagement surveys: make sure, your workforce sees them as time well invested
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
When talking to HR managers, internal communication professionals, and other people responsible for engagements surveys or any kind on employee survey, we find that many of them have a similar problem: employees respond with an increasing amount of cynicism, mostly along the lines of “It doesn’t matter what we say in these surveys. They don’t change anything anyway.”

There are various reasons for employees feeling (often rightly so) that these surveys are a waste of their time and their organisations’ resources. Sometimes they are done for no other reason indeed, than to have a number to benchmark against, and to boast about. There’s no need to comment on this.

However, quite often an engagement survey is run based on the best of intentions, but its design or the levers actually available to pull do not allow any action that’s eventually reaching the workforce. There is also a common misconception that HR changing policies and pieces of paper qualifies as “action”.

Engagement surveys have the potential to help you improving business performance and to be perceived as a valuable exercise by your people. To get there, 3 basic elements must be observed:
  • Design the survey so that it clearly indicates the levers you have to pull, once you get the results. That’s far more important than having a single number for benchmarking purposes. We love to use surveys based on the Gallup Q12, but there are other ways to do it.
  • Make sure that you are actually able to pull these levers. In most cases this means you need to be able to change the way line managers manage the people directly reporting to them. If this doesn’t happen, you are unlikely to get beyond a paper exercise.
  • Act (there’s always some opportunity to improve. Being above industry benchmark doesn’t justify complacency) and make it very transparent to everybody what you are going to change, how this relates to survey results, what it is supposed to achieve, and what this means for the individual.
Sounds simple enough, but experience shows it’s not that easy. In most cases the initiative falls down because HR owns the survey and follow-up, but is not able to influence line managers to make any effective changes. If this is the case, you can save your money. Why would you invest in expensive diagnostics, if you know you won’t be able to treat the patient?
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It’s not only Tiger Woods: how does your people’s behaviour affect shareholder value?
Sunday, April 11, 2010
We recently came across this figure: the extramarital escapades of Tiger Woods cost the shareholders of his 5 major sponsors anything between US$ 5bn and 12bn (see http://faculty.gsm.ucdavis.edu/~vstango/tiger003.pdf). This is a lot of money and companies have become increasingly aware of the risk they take with celebrity advertising.

However, it often seems that a factor most likely to be far more important is off the radar screen of executives: the every day impact of your employees behaviour, even when they are not directly interacting with customers.
  • It’s the way the drivers of your branded vans behave in traffic – not to forget unbranded company cars, which are often easy to recognise from number plates or just colour and type.
  • It’s how employees talk about their employer, when they are with friends and family (do you recon they say “We are going to launch this product” or “They are…”)
  • It’s when this employee of a credit card company says at the store checkout: “I know these cards are crap. I only use it, because I work there”.
  • And it’s when prominent managers behave disgraceful in public, even where no explicit connection with the company is made. And make no mistake: much less is needed to damage your brand on a local level than a CEO being arrested for antisocial behaviour in the centre of Rome (this 15 years old escapade of Daimler’s CEO Jürgen Schremp still comes up second on Google, when searching for “Daimler” and “Rome”)
All these things can constantly erode your brand value, leaving your marketing department fighting an uphill battle. What you really want are employees taking pride in the organisation they are representing and broadcasting a positive message. So what?

We are not suggesting that you should police your workforce’s behaviour nor should you draw up a huge set of rules on “How to behave brand friendly 24/7”. On the contrary. If you want your people representing your brand positively, than it has to be their brand to begin with. It is still striking how often organisations treat their “normal” brand and employer brand as two separate entities. On this basis, you’re not going to excel.

What you need is a set of shared values to build a brand upon your people are proud of. If you create ONE culture, ONE reality, then there’s no micromanagement required to keep each employee in line with the brand. Culture is much stronger than rules and formal controls.

This is not that easy? Right! This is a strategy for winners, not for the mediocre firm. It’s a long shot and it’ll never be 100% perfect, but even if you get it nearly right, you probably won't need the Tiger Woods’ of this world any more to raise your brand value.

And as this is a Monday and Mondays are perfect to start something new, here’s the first step for you: take stock of your organisation’s culture and values. Not the executives’ view! Go out there and do a proper cultural audit across your organisation. And then find out what journey lies ahead of you to get it where it needs to be…
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Recruitment Best Practice: Use referrals instead of recruitment agencies and beware of online application forms
Sunday, March 21, 2010
We discussed typical issues occurring, when you use recruitment agencies, on this blog already (see this article on salesforce incentivisation on iProCon Insight 09/2008). Based on a recent case study and a survey as well as further observations, we want to give you some ideas about how to cut recruitment cost while increasing quality at the same time by using alternative channels and by managing agencies better, when you need them.

This article on recruitment best practice  
  • shows some evidence that many organisations spend far too much on recruitment agencies, while still not getting the best candidates
  • presents a case study on how an Australian software company cut recruitment costs by half relying much more on referrals than agencies
  • explores the role of recruiting websites, communication, and organisational culture in your recruitment process
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Understanding Project Behaviour: book recommendation
Monday, February 01, 2010
Our latest book recommendation is "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies" (Tom DeMarco at al).

This book describes 86 typical behavioural patterns with a strong impact on success or failure of any project. The succinct descriptions make it easier to identify these patterns in your organisation. Highly recommended for project and programme managers, but even more important for project sponsors and executives, who often drive project teams into an unwanted pattern without even realising it themselves.

For a 2 page review of the book click here: "Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior".


If you are looking for excellent project management and change managers, iProCon Ltd. can provide high quality professionals from a dedicated network. Just drop us a line and we call you back: contact@iprocon.co.uk 
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Cynicism prevails as an attitude towards appraisal systems
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
In its November edition the British magazine “Human Resources” (www.hrmagazine.co.uk) published the article “Must try harder”, which indicates that appraisals are still considered a waste of time by far too many employees.

At iProCon HCM we have found a very cynical attitude towards appraisal or performance management systems in general. While the article mentioned above names a lack of integration into reward and career management, we believe the problem is of a much broader nature: the appraisee can rarely see the links between their performance and the performance of the core business, and the process is all too often owned by HR rather than line management. It is therefore often considered an HR-admin nuisance, while it should be one of the most important tools for line managers on all levels to manage their people. This topic was addressed during the HR2009 conference in Prague by iProCon Partner Sven Ringling in his session “Proven techniques to optimize your global performance management strategy”. If you would like to learn more, please contact us.
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Talent gaps in the public sector
Thursday, December 03, 2009
In its edition from 31st October 2009 The Economist magazine published an article with the title “A tough search for talent”. This article points out that the public sector across most rich countries struggles to find the right talent, an issue expected to get even worse when the labour market becomes more difficult for employers once the current economic crisis ends.

Two factors making it particularly difficult are:
  • The public sector is increasingly looking for candidates with profiles closer to what the private sector is looking for.
  • The culture within many public sector organisations can easily alienate the talent needed to face the challenges of the future.

These factors lead to the public sector losing many of the better candidates to the private or the charity sectors. You can read the full article via this link: www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14753826
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Some HCM metrics just don't measure up
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
A well known Human Capital consulting firm recently published their structured approach to taking HR to the next level. Within this was a section focused on identifying HR’s primary performance measures.

Quite rightly they suggest that HR performance measures should focus on business impact, not just on HR operating efficiency. They go on to say that one of the best ways to measure how effectively a company is leveraging the value of its people is to consider its workforce productivity, defined as revenue per employee divided by profit per employee.

Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately in the HCM sphere, there is a tendency to force complex people metrics into oversimplified, financially relevant KPIs. Whilst HCM should absolutely be linked back to business value, value is not delivered by creating relationships between HCM and financial performance that at best are not causal*, and at worst do not exist at all.

“Workforce Productivity” is an example of a metric that has absolutely nothing to do with measuring the effectiveness of people. Before the iProCon HCM email server is crashed by countless emails pointing to the existence of “Employees” in the definition, consider the following:

A company (let’s call it B.Com**) makes widgets in a factory staffed by 10 people. In 2007 B.Com made £12k of profit on revenues of £100k. In 2008 B.Com increased profits on the same £100k revenues to £15k, without changing their staffing. B.Com have done well in 2008, but their Workforce Productivity has declined from 8.3 to 6.7! But wait, there’s more...

Consider the definition of Workforce Productivity: Revenue/Employee divided by Profit/Employee


Basic maths tells us that this equation can also be expressed as: Revenue/Employee multiplied by Employee/Profit


Cancelling out the “Employees” from the top and bottom lines leads to: Workforce Productivity = Revenue/Profit


Don’t believe it? Consider B.Com again: In 2007 they made £12k of profit on revenues of £100k, rising to £15k profit on £100k revenues in 2008.

2007 Workforce Productivity = 100/12 = 8.3
2008 Workforce Productivity = 100/15 = 6.7

Jargon and irrelevant but nice sounding KPIs are prevalent within the HCM sphere, as more organisations try to show how their HCM solutions drive real, sustained business value. The challenge is to see through the flashing lights and marketing spiel and ensure that real, causal links exist from HCM interventions back to the core drivers of business value.


* Causal: when one event occurs as a direct result of another event. Some events may be correlated (i.e. they move together), but there is always the chance that they move together because of another event.
**B.Com is a fictional company. Any resemblance to other companies, either past or present, is purely coincidental.
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Innovation is more than a leadership team
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
A recent HBR article (“Innovation in turbulent times”, June 2009: http://tinyurl.com/mmpgfg) discussed the need for businesses to have creative, “right brain” types in leadership positions. It suggests that innovation is the result of pairing creative with analytical thinkers - when businesses have too few creative thinkers in leadership positions, innovation is vulnerable to unwise cost cutting, in particular during hard times.

Whilst there is some truth in the need to have a good mix of “left and right brain” thinkers, that is nothing new – diversity of thought is vital to establish the strong funnel of ideas from which to promote those with the most promise. Where the article falls short is in the lack of structure it places around the innovation process as a whole. In fact, it starts with the statement “innovation is a messy process – hard to measure and hard to manage”.

Innovation doesn't have to be messy, and it should certainly not be left to the effective partnership between two individuals in leadership positions. When managed effectively innovation is simply another business process, taking ideas through prioritisation and realisation in a way that meets the organisation’s strategic objectives and takes account of the innovation culture.

For additional information on frameworks and tools to help deliver and measure innovation in your organisation please contact us.
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