In the ‘Comprehensive Guide to Business Transformation’, June 2022, Freshminds offered the following definition of Business Transformation:
”A long-term project that aims to improve and modernise parts of a business…an essential part of company evolution.”
Businesses can hardly put a brake on that evolution as they need to stay competitive and create revenue and profit - so what’s been happening since then?
We explore how some organisations have been supporting their transformation initiatives and ways in which the benefits can be delivered better.
Transformation – what has been happening?
The world of transformation is itself, evolving, partly due to the upsurge in political, economic, and social uncertainties. This has led to some CEOs putting their transformation programmes on hold.
A slowdown has also suppressed the need for professional external support from subject matter experts sourced from the Big 4, smaller boutiques, individual consultants, or interims.
Some businesses have looked for alternative solutions and reached internally for the capability to design, set up, and run their transformations.
Taking very capable people from their business-as-usual (BAU) roles can damage the ongoing success of the business and often these resources are not freed up to take part. The solution has often been to offer the transformation roles to those that can be released from BAU as a ‘development opportunity’, often requiring some training to fill the skills gaps.
Transformation programmes are complex and require experience and courage to manage objectives, activities, behaviours, and the ever-present cultural challenges surrounding change.
This comes with experience built up over a number of years, by delivering successes, making mistakes, building on lessons learned, and being given the opportunity to try it out again in a no-blame culture.
“Balancing transformation against BAU is the critical resourcing challenge for most organisations. Underinvestment on either side of the coin brings real risks. The key is flexibility and agility – to be able to move resources quickly and effectively toward the activity of greatest impact.”
Thom Cunningham-Burley, COO, Freshminds
So how are your transformation programmes going? Are you delivering the business case and the overall benefits? Are your stakeholders aligned? Are your employees motivated and engaged? Is this programme seen as a success or a draw on the budget?
These are all good questions that can be understood by undertaking an inflight review of your transformation programme.
In Flight Reviews
These are reviews of the overall transformation programme, designed to help business leaders understand the likelihood of success, the realisation of the business case, and the sustainability of the changes.
The review can also be undertaken to understand whether the transformation programme is still relevant and necessary.
These are challenging and sometimes difficult objectives. Resistance can be met from stakeholders at all levels of the organisation due to internal politics, structure, and sensitivities. Those involved may have something to gain or lose by continuing or changing plans and structures.
Such a review is best undertaken by someone not directly involved in the programme – whether within or external to the business - and who has the skills, capability, and experience to dive into the activities without bias or prejudice.
The Process of Conducting Reviews
This is a process that requires involvement and engagement and includes interviewing stakeholders, programme leads, and a cross-section of programme team members and employees.
There are typically nine key phases as identified below:
Check Relevance
What is the organisation's strategy?
What has changed since the programme started?
How valid is the business case?
Where does the programme have the most impact?
Review the Vision
What is the vision?
What are the objectives?
What are the drivers?
What is the overall programme scope?
Review the Business Case
What is in the business case?
What progress has been made?
Understand Stakeholder Engagement
Interview the stakeholders and understand the alignment
Interview the Workstream leads
How deep is employee engagement?
What are the areas of resistance?
Skills Analysis
Assess capabilities
Understand skills gaps
Review Approach
Understand the methodology
Review the plan
Review governance
Understand the tools being used
Review the RAID Log
Review lessons learnt log/retrospectives
Understand the change management approach
Understand the communications approach
Review Workstreams
Understand the structure
Review the goals
Review progress against deliverables
Understand costs
Check Financials
Assess costs
Assess budget
Assess financial performance
Deep Dives
Undertake a ‘deep dive’ into areas of particular concern
The Deliverables
As with most aspects of transformation and change, the inflight review needs to be structured and comprehensive. A full review of the programme allows for best practices to be recognised and enhancements to be made.
Typically, one would seek to identify:
Success to be acknowledged and celebrated
Risks to be mitigated
Assessment of potential future challenges
Workstream deficiencies
Skills gaps
Recommendations for improvement
Plans recommended to better deliver the business case
This is not only about what is happening today but about planning for the longer term. Project drivers also need to appreciate the nuances of making recommendations; to ensure that participants and teams are on board with changes.
Setting Change in the Process
Whatever the results of the review, there is rarely an ‘instant fix’. The necessary improvements only come as the recommendations are planned and implemented.
Inflight reviews can lead to a turnaround of the programme with a sharper focus on the delivery of the business case, the overall organisation engagement, and the sustainability of the change.
More challenging is the decision to cancel the programme altogether, and how to manage expectations and communicate the decision and why it was made.
The review may have identified some skills gaps that can be addressed with relevant training and professional development opportunities: giving people some challenging objectives to work with whilst on the programme, but at the same time ‘setting them up for success’.
‘Shadowing’ can be used, whereby a more experienced resource leads a particular initiative to transfer skills and responsibility to the internal resources.
Bringing external resources can supplement the skill set and might free up space to deliver more successful outcomes than the team has been able to achieve on its own.
Conclusion
With an increasing tendency to utilise internal resources for transformation programmes, it is important to ensure that these resources are properly trained and supported to make a success of the overall objectives of the programme.
Shadowing, training, mentoring, coaching and using external experts, are all options that are open to businesses to get a transformation programme back on track.
It is key that any use of external resources has an objective of skills transfer, leaving business leaders with the heightened internal capability to lead the next transformation programme because the need for businesses to evolve and change is constant.
But… don’t just leave an inflight review until something goes terribly wrong. This should be a programme management tool that is used proactively as a part of the overall programme approach.
Lindsay Murdoch
Lindsay Murdoch, founder, and co-leader at Intaconsult, collaborates with organisations to drive Business Transformation activities, ensuring the delivery of sustainable business benefits while transferring essential skills and capabilities to clients through Programme and Change initiatives.
