Reinforcement Mechanisms: Making the New Way the Easy Way
The reinforcement plan has three items: a recognition scheme for early adopters, a monthly newsletter of success stories, and posters in the break room. Meanwhile the new process takes eleven clicks where the old one took four, the report people actually need is not built yet, and the legacy screen still works. Reinforcement, in that […]
Read articleFrom Project to BAU: Who Owns the Process After the Programme Closes
The closure report is signed. The programme team is redeployed, the steering committee is stood down, and the system is described as being in business as usual. Nobody has said who now owns the process. Eighteen months later, when someone asks why the credit check step was configured to run before rather than after approval, […]
Read articleDeskless and Frontline Workers: Readiness Without Email
Almost every readiness practice assumes a particular person: someone with a work email address, a laptop, a calendar with gaps in it, and the discretion to spend twenty minutes on a survey. A warehouse operative, a nurse, a driver, a retail assistant and a field engineer have none of those things. When a programme reports […]
Read articleMulti-Country Rollouts: Where Global Change Plans Break Locally
The template is 95 per cent standard. That was the design principle, it was agreed at board level, and it is the reason the business case works. Four countries then take roughly twice as long as planned, and in the post-implementation review they are described as having been resistant to standardisation. In three of the […]
Read articleWorks Councils and Change Programmes: Consultation Without Delay
The German go-live slipped by four months. Not for a technical reason — the build was finished — but because the works agreement covering the new system had not been concluded, and without it the system could not be switched on. The programme plan had a line for it. It said “works council briefing”, it […]
Read articleWhat Change Management Actually Costs on an ERP Programme
“What percentage of the programme budget should change management be?” It is the question every sponsor asks, and the honest answer is that the percentage heuristics in circulation are not evidence. Figures between 5 and 15 per cent get quoted freely, almost always without a traceable source, usually by organisations selling the service. A number […]
Read articleHow to Build the Business Case for a Change Management Budget
The programme budget is £14 million. The change management line is £180,000, and in month three it is cut to £110,000 because the integration workstream needs more testing capacity. The cut is not unreasonable from where the decision was made. Testing capacity has a defined output and a visible consequence if it is missing. The […]
Read articleWhat to Do When Your Sponsor Is Absent
Your sponsor has missed the last three steering committees. Decisions are being deferred, two functions are in an unresolved argument, and requests for people are met with sympathy and no movement. Most advice on this subject is written for the sponsor. This is written for the person who has to deliver anyway. Diagnose before you […]
Read articleActive Sponsorship: What Sponsors Must Do, Not Just Say
The sponsor has done everything asked of them. They opened the kick-off, recorded a video, mentioned the programme in the quarterly town hall, and attend the steering committee most months. The programme still cannot get two people released from operations, two functions have been disagreeing about master data ownership since May, and nobody believes the […]
Read articleWhat a Change Steering Committee Should Decide (and What It Shouldn’t)
The steering committee meets monthly for ninety minutes. Roughly seventy of those minutes are spent presenting status: what has been completed, what is on track, what is amber and why. In the remaining twenty, nothing is decided that could not have been decided by the programme manager. The committee has spent its meeting being informed, […]
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