We manage these complex projects through 5 areas of focus, or lenses as we call them, that give you control. Increasing your chances of success and getting you back to focussing on running your business sooner.

Our approach creates business ownership by putting people first throughout the delivery; which increases adoption rates significantly.

Sounds obvious but it is rarely done. Don’t just tick the box of providing resource from your team to the project, but challenge yourself by asking: “Who do I trust to represent me and my team to get the most out of this investment?”

Once they’ve been onboarded, whether they are going to form part of the core delivery team, or are a Champion in the business; train them. Get them upskilled in the things they’ll need to be successful in their role. That could be ‘technical project elements’ like Requirements Gathering, Business Impact Assessments, Data Migration, or Testing. Or ‘change management elements’ like Resilience, Facilitation, Decision Making and Teaming (here’s a great video from Amy Edmondson on Teaming)

When you tell the story, make your people the hero of it, not your change program. Pitch it on how this will help them achieve their goals and ambitions, the program is purely a guide to help them along the way.

Watch this webinar, which was streamed to hundreds of people from Birmingham Tech Week on putting your people at the heart of transformation.

This will change everything for you.

Establish responsibilities in a way that helps your key user communities understand that they are not only a Customer of the change, but a Supplier of it. This means that they understand from day 1 that they have as much responsibility in facilitating the successful and timely delivery of the program as the program itself.

After all, they have rich business knowledge, will want to influence key decisions, and ultimately are the ones who will be using the solution after it has been delivered.

This is definitely a mindset shift that can seem alien at first, but once up and running, it proves to be liberating. It is about putting people in control of their destiny – helping them shape their future within the constraints of the scope of the program. In doing so, the business starts to pull for the change.

This is a brilliant and simple technique to gain business-driven insights into what could make this project go off course in a meaningful and actionable way. When you explore this with your business, they will often provide you with the insights needed to engage them, on their terms, to gain the commitment required to successfully deliver.

To quote Gary Kline writing in Harvard Business Review “A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.”

Read Gary’s full article.

Talking hard truths to stakeholders is paramount. If you can establish psychological safety in the team, where no-one fears speaking up, you can certainly create an environment where stakeholders not only accept, but fully expect to have tough conversations.

Think of the Team CODE as an identity, the rules of engagement for shaping the project team and how you are going to act.

Connect: Do you understand your people? Understand the environment so your people feel connected in order to bring them on the change journey with you.