In Australia there are a number of key factors which must be in place to ensure a successful transformation. In this article we will explore the role of the transformation leadership group and five of the key issues to avoid. Avoiding these issues will ensure your transformations efforts are rewarded with the outcomes you set out to achieve.

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I cannot count the number of time we have seen transformation efforts fail because the leadership assigned to undertake the transformation is not committed to the total transformation effort. So let’s spend some time debunking what is required to lead a transformation and what is not.

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  1. Leadership does not equal the Executive Team

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We see too many Executives taking a back seat on transformation projects and only engaging during steering committee meetings in which they express some concerns about risk and issues.

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Transformation leadership needs to come from those closest to the customer and those most impacted by the changes.  This is very rarely the Executive.

 

So the first rule is to identify those most impacted and regardless of organisational structure assign a team of leaders who are passionate about defining and living in the future state as your total transformation team.

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This team of transformation leaders will need direct access to the Executive on a monthly basis to report progress and engage the Executive in decision making. However, their role is to lead the planning, design, build, implementation and adoption of the benefits assigned to the transformation program.

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  2. Over-reliance on the project manager/scrum masters to know what to do

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Regardless of the capability or experience of your project manager the outputs delivered by a project manager/scrum master is a direct relationship with the inputs they received from the organisations leadership (or lack of).

 

The total transformation leadership team must clearly outline the benefits, goals and assumptions for the delivery team to deliver against.

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 Nothing is more frustrating when the project team are trying to guess at the benefits and then use fuzzy logic to link the benefits of the project to the goals outlined by the organisation's leadership.  If definition and analysis of benefits is delegated to a project/change manager and is not owned and managed by the total transformation team the transformation is doomed to fail.

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The consequence of this is no-one is aligned around the overarching purpose of the program and no-one is aligned around the desired future state. Sure there might be a couple of leaders with some vision of what the future could be, but it is not aligned across the organisation and it is not clear when the going gets tough what can be held fast and what can be compromised.

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So, the total transformation team needs to be the architects of the vision for the future state(s), the benefits of these future states and the roadmap for getting there.

 

The role of the project team is to operationalise the roadmap and deliver the new capabilities so the benefits and goals can be obtained in collaboration with the total transformation team.

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  3. Technical "go live" does not equal the closure of the transformation program

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We are often brought into projects as they are about to “go-live” to ensure the business is ready to take on the new capability (be it technology, processes, SLAs etc) that is about to be dropped. All too often when reviewing the go-live approach we see the project funding being extinguished 2-4 week after the go-live has occurred. 

 

Often the project manager will tell us that all the training has occurred and once the system is live they have a clear plan to support the business for a 2-4 week period as they transition into BAU.  Once the 2-4 week period is completed, the project will be closed.

 

In our experience, this support period barely provides the business will time to adopt to the new ways of working and rarely provides the leadership with the business benefits they set out to achieve  This is not a project manager’s issue, but a transformation leadership issue.

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In these cases there are typically no metrics for adoption (please don’t confuse people completing training with adoption), no plan to assess proficiency and no plan to capture the benefits and goals the project set out to achieve.

 

Once again, total transformation leaders need to ensure they are driving the project managers to deliver the capability and the enablement of people, processes and systems to ensure the benefits are obtained, not just the technology or the new processes.

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Just to be super clear, training does not equal proficiency.

 

We typically recommend the total  transformation leadership team set the criteria for go live, set the utilisation and adoption metrics and determine how long it will take for people to become proficient. Utilisation, adoption and proficiency are the key metrics which need to be constructed, monitored and reported on to ensure the desired future state can be met and benefits achieved. 

 

Furthermore, what intervention needs to be implemented to ensure the time to proficiency provides the commercial advantages that are sort when the transformation was first conceived. 

 

4. We don’t need a total transformation team we have a business owner/senior responsible officer

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Just imagine for a minute, the perfect business owner.  This is the Holy Grail for any project person.  A single person with full accountability, unfettered availability to the project team and the ability to make decisions without consultation.  Just imagine.

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The concept of a single person as a business owner is not only a fantasy it is not practical to ensure all commercial benefits are achieved and all impacted parts of the business are clearly represented.  We strongly believe that the concept of business owner needs to be embedded in a total transformation leadership team. Furthermore, business owners need to be represented from all parts of the impacted parts of the business including IT.

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Archetypal studies exploring the difference in Australian and American business culture clearly demonstrate American’s respond well and buy into the hero culture - the one person who can do it all.  Whereas in Australia our business culture responds to mateship and sharing stories (read as whinging).

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In our practice we have seen numerous examples of hero leaders trying to run transformation programs off their own backs and we have watched them fail, with no ability to understand why.  The premise of the business owner is fine, but the application of it in Australia needs to be across a transformation leadership team.

 

  5. Fighting over BAU vs project resources

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For my money this is hands down the best constraint to effective transformation processes in Australia. Australian transformation programs as always are impacted by the availability of skilled internal resources to work on project planning, design, testing, implementation and delivery. Once again, this is a leadership issue and often defies logic.

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If you are going to undertake a transformation of any description, it is done because you need to achieve an outcome that the current way of working cannot deliver. To achieve a transformation resources need to be allocated and committed.  Interestingly, we often see the investment capital is easier to obtain than the intellectual capital. 

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We have had numerous conversations with stakeholders where they tell us, I can’t release that staff member to testing, because we are so busy with meeting our customer commitment at the moment.  This would be a fair enough assertion, if the benefits of meeting the current commitment were equal to or more than they investment required to deliver the entire transformation benefits.

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Total transformation leaders must clearly understand both the capital and intellectual resourcing they require at each stage of the project and enlist them to ensure the project can be delivered and adopted into the organisation.

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Each of these issues outlined can be address by thinking about and setting up a strong total transformation leadership team. Our advice is to review your own transformation initiative and really assess it against these problems outlined above. If you experience any one of these issues your transformation program will be at risk of delivering the benefits and goals you initially set out to achieve.

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About the author(s)

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Lee Stubbs is the managing partner in our Melbourne office.