IT Directions

In my last post I began explaining the different high-level roles involved in the governance of business change, by focusing on Requirements Management - a role that deserves special attention since:

• Requirements Management (as opposed to Requirements Gathering or Requirements Analysis) is widely misunderstood - or not understood at all;
• Requirements are fundamental to any form of business change - get your requirements wrong and any related efforts are doomed to failure.

In future posts I will discuss the other high-level business change roles:

• Stakeholder Management
• Business Change Management
• Benefits Management
• Risk And Dependency Management
• Marketing And Communications

First, however, some people have asked why all these roles are necessary.  To see this, it is necessary to backtrack and ask a preceding question: what are the goals of a business change activity?

You might think that goals would be different in every case, but in fact the key aims of business change are always the same:

• To ensure that work meets stakeholder needs - for which you need to identify stakeholders, both internal and external, and communicate with them effectively;
• To deliver results into a business-as-usual environment - the key purpose of a dedicated business change role;
• To maximise benefits from outcomes - i.e., work out in advance what your benefits will be, and then ensure that the consequent work realizes these benefits;
• To minimize the costs associated with delivery - which means managing dependencies and risks.

A little thought shows that, to achieve these goals, the Roles above are all necessary.  In some cases more than one Role may be played by the same person, but unless you start with an understanding of Roles and associated responsibilities, important activities will slip through the net and your work will not deliver the desired results.

TAKE AWAY

There are many different methods for handling business change.  For example, many consulting firms base their practice on a proprietary approach to business change.  However, none of these methods are grounded in a robust theory of human work (since the first such theory is Human Interaction Management, which only appeared recently).

In the end, all current mainstream approaches to business change are essentially a synthesis of carefully selected best practices.  The problem with such approaches is that it becomes hard to join all the dots - to connect high-level strategy with middle-management practice with operational activities.  Many business change activities appear to have succeeded but fail to deliver the expected results, since there are unforeseen breakdowns where the realities of human-driven process enactment do not live up to the expectation as depicted on colourful Web dashboards.

A key reason for this is Pareto’s rule: that the 20% of “exceptions” (which are really the rule, since they always occur) consume 80% of the costs.  To properly handle such edge cases, you need processes that have flexibility designed in - processes that do not pretend real life is as simple and mechanistic as a flowchart.

In harsh economic times, when cost reduction and improved effectivess is more necessary than ever, we need to get business change right first time - which means acknowledging this real-world nature of human-driven work.  We need a new approach to business change, an approach like the GOOD method associated with HIM (aspects of which I am describing here).

In future posts I will show the different areas of interest of each of the Roles above, and explain  how to develop a governance structure for your business change project, venture or initiative that ensures they collaborate effectively.