Change management should be considered from the start

Change management is a key and integral ingredient for successful transformations. However, in practice little investment in change management is seen, and when support is committed, it’s often embraced half-heartedly. According to Nital Hooper, a senior manager at consulting firm Servita, the ‘soft side’ of change should be a full-time job during transitions.

As Frank Sinatra would say, "you can’t have one without the other". Change management, often seen as the fluffy part of transformation, is the "love" to the "marriage" of vision, strategy and IT. However, unless it’s incorporated and understood, it won’t work. The transformation project will suffer – from delays and rising costs due to competing priorities and a lack of employee and leadership belief from the very start. People affected by change must have the belief and the buy-in of the plan, benefits and organisational vision. 

Project managers manage stakeholders. That’s their job. So, surely this problem is theirs and theirs alone? Having witnessed how this impacts overall project quality and speed, the responsibility is much wider – it needs to extend beyond the immediate line of reporting. Change management needs a much broader, wider picture. 

Change management should be a recognised chunk of work for any IT project and programme, without inhibiting project managers and delivery people. Effectively, what you want is one team to initiate, define, deliver and conclude successful transformations that ensure business benefits are achieved as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Transformation will always impact business as usual (BAU) and vice versa; key is that communication and impacts should be realised upfront between operations and transformation.

In the UK, we are actually pretty good at recognising change management – I have worked with big clients that understood it’s necessity at the very start of the project. In those cases, the projects have flourished because projects work well when people know what is expected of them. Problems will always arise when the change is not properly consulted and defined. 

For example, back in 2011 the public accounts committee said the Firecontrol scheme – a project to set up nine regional control centres for fire and rescue services in England – had not achieved any of its objectives, and that eight of the centres were empty "white elephants". The project was deemed a "complete failure" and wasted £469 million. A total lack of stakeholder consultation was considered as the key reason for the failure.

Often communication is centred on what the transformation will do. There is very little of “what this means to you”. It’s understandable. Change is often not thought about in terms of opportunity, but in terms of fear. That’s a basic human reaction. But we need to think of it as the former, and senior management within large organisations need to communicate that effectively. 

We need the support of everyone within the business to see a complex, large-scale or high-value business transformation programme to its fruition. You cannot lose out on the motivation and productivity of your team because you haven’t effectively addressed concerns with the “what this means to you” question. Chaos interferes with the IT project being delivered. You need those people on board, working towards the end goal. 

For the industry, change management should be incorporated into the scope of the project from the beginning. Communicate it well, and you can unlock the benefits of shared ideas and joint working to enable quicker, better and more cost-effective outcomes, ultimately achieving the transformational vision you started with.