When a programme is over-running and over-spending, the situation can be heavily compounded by the organisational reaction. It’s a bit like being in an escape room where you have been conditioned to believe that there are only three levers marked cost, time and outcome.
How do you persuade your team-mates not to touch those levers, and what other levers might be in the room?
The answer is of course yes, but is it also sapping the organisation’s attention, energy and intellect at the expense of other more important things such as strategy, customer focus and genuine evolution of the business’s operating model? Profits aside, what are the wider impact of defective change? What is the trajectory of defective change, and most importantly, what’s the solution?
There’s a scene I’ve watched play out umpteen times over the past three decades. The setting is the boardroom, and the starring role is played by a question that I’ve seen posed by some of the most astute non-execs I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Usually it is directed to the member of the c-suite who is designated as the executive sponsor of the current over-running, over-spending, slippage-laden transformation programme.
There’s an old adage that programme slippage is a bit like carbon monoxide poisoning: It’s cumulative, often invisible and there are few warning signs prior to the unconscious drift into the fatal moment. In a programme, the analogy is all of those instances where the small deadlines were missed; a week here, a couple of days there.
One of my (many) formative experiences in programme delivery was working with a banking client in 2018 right when TSB’s troubled data migration hit the headlines. It was variously described as a ‘meltdown’ and a ‘fiasco’ in the popular press, who carried stories on a daily basis ranging from customers being unable to pay their mortgages or access their accounts, through to one mythical account holder who had supposedly found an extra £5M in his bank account.
“Should I replace my programme director?”
Almost always, the answer is ‘no’. Here are a few reasons as to why, followed by the four exceptional circumstances under which maybe you should replace them.
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.”
The onset is the point in a programme where initial symptoms of potential failure start to emerge. Anyone who has ever experienced this situation will tell you that it is almost impossible to identify the moment at which the situation crystalised, and that’s for two reasons: The first is that the symptoms are cumulative – no single symptom on its own equals ‘failure’, but the accumulation of symptoms could, combined, mean that the programme will not be able to deliver the outcome within the agreed timeframe and at the agreed cost.
A reset typically occurs when a programme that has been struggling to meet its milestones and control its spending finally exceeds the elastic limit of optimism and cannot proceed any further without major revisions to timeframe and budget. For the executive sponsor, it’s the biggest single test of programme leadership.
A Special Forces’ selection exercise from the 1980s provides a unique perspective on how people respond to change. And it has big implications for the role of change management within a programme.