Oxford8 typically engage with a new client from one of three points in the lifecycle of a programme – the outset, the onset or the reset. This insight, the first of a series of three, explores the specific challenges clients face at the outset.
The outset – the beginning of a new programme – may look superficially like a greenfield experience, but it rarely is. It typically follows rapidly on the heels of the previous programme, which often means that the organisation is freshly scarred by whatever transpired before – the overspend, the organisational burnout, and above all, the belief that “we’re just not very good at change.”
It’s often the first real leadership test for the executive sponsor, and it presents a question that is extremely difficult to answer: “This time will be different because…?” And if it’s tough to answer, it’s even tougher to make people believe it. Self-limiting beliefs are not only human: They can be organisational as well. So here’s a digest of what does and what does not work in our experience. Let’s start with what doesn’t work.
“We’ve learnt our lessons.” If there is one lesson to be learnt from lessons learnt, it’s that organisations seldom do learn their lessons. Think about your own experiences and the extent to which you see the same programme experience play out, time after time. And research backs that up, so lessons learnt is not a good ledge against another difficult programme.
“We’re really going to apply some rigour this time.” Now that’s a more promising way forward, but how are you going to give effect to that objective? To what aspects will rigour be applied, and how? And how will that make the difference?
If you like your sporting heroes, it’s well worth taking a look at the philosophy of Dave Brailsford, the former British Cycling Performance Director. The British Olympic Cycling Team achieved unprecedented dominance of both Beijing 2008 and London 2012, and this was popularly (but, full disclosure – not universally) attributed to Brailsford’s strategy of marginal gains; the cumulative impact of incremental rather than wholesale changes. Brailsford went to the enth degree on every aspect of the cycling team’s operations; everything from nutrition and personal hygiene (yep!) to helmets and pillows. On each aspect, even a 1% improvement in performance was judged a success, because cumulatively those improvements added up the difference between a gold medal, and being placed twentieth.
There’s a lot that programmes can learn from this philosophy, simply because there are so many aspects to running a programme well. There is no one single thing that defines or determines programme success. However, just for illustration, here are three examples of where we typically focus during an engagement from the outset.
Scope. ‘Creep’ is often cited as a factor in programme failure, but in our experience, it’s not so much scope creep as scope fog; vague, aspirational sound bites that leave the scope wide open to interpretation. The antidote? Two ingredients:
- A detailed in-scope statement. Deconstruction is your friend here: Keep breaking it down into specifics and examples until you can go no further.
- An equally detailed out-of-scope statement: “Anything that is not in scope” won’t cut it. Call out the things that are out of scope and explain why they are out-of-scope, and if they are to be addressed in a different time and place, explain when and where.
Planning. For everything that’s known or knowable, there’s the plan. Our approach to planning is explained in more detail here, but the point is that the outset is the ideal opportunity to embed effective planning – the sort that generates executable plans – from day one. The rigour also extends to assumptions. There’s nothing wrong with assumptions provided that they are a) genuinely necessary, and b) have a (short) date by which they will be converted into known facts.
Risks and Issue Management. For everything that’s unknown, unknowable or has been overlooked (which will happen), there’s the programme’s risk and issue management. What rigour means for both risk and issue management is set out in more detail here, but as with planning, the outset is the ideal opportunity to embed the right approach from day one.
These are just three examples, but here’s the most important point: Doing these things well doesn’t actually take any more time or effort than doing them poorly. In our experience, it’s a simple matter of having the right approaches, systems and training in place from the outset. Then, as programme sponsor, you’ll have something to point to that tangibly demonstrates that the programme is indeed ‘set up for success’.