Tips for Managing Large-Scale Transitions
If you're leading a significant organisational change in a large enterprise, chances are you've felt the strain of limited resources and people-power. It's a common challenge, and can turn some days into a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, but it doesn't have to be insurmountable.
Here are some strategies to help forge ahead with change during times of low resourcing:
1. Prioritise and Focus
Identify Critical Success Factors: Pinpoint the most essential elements for the change's success. This may involve brainstorming with the team and having conversations with stakeholders to validate your focus is in the right areas.
Trim the Fat: Cut out unnecessary tasks or activities that won't significantly impact the outcome. Examine your templates and ask yourself if anyone is really reading a 40-page change management plan. If not, cut back the volume of output, and cut back to the essential, interested audience.
Delegate Wisely: Assign tasks to capable individuals, even if they aren't directly involved in the change. Practice the art of 'undertaking'. If a task is already underway with a willing participant, albeit not the way you'd do it, let them go for it and find a higher priority to work on.
2. Leverage Existing Resources
Internal Experts: Identify individuals within your organisation who have relevant skills or experience. Try setting up a rotation of business people and subject matter experts into the team. This fulfils the dual purpose of business involvement and gaining extra resource.
Cross-Functional Teams: Assemble teams with diverse expertise to tackle various aspects of the change. Become an eagle at spotting capacity. It's very common for the workload in project teams to move around peaking with different teams at different times. If the testing team has a reduced workload, why not get them involved in some change analysis?
Technology: Utilise tools and software to streamline processes and improve efficiency. Look for tools that can 'centralise' the view of change to provide additional insights into the spread and timing of impact across the broader organisation.
3. Foster a Culture of Change
Communicate Openly: Keep employees informed about the change's progress, goals, and benefits. Use a hub and spoke model for efficiency in communication. Keep your intranet page (or other hub) up to date, and have your outward communications direct audiences back to the source.
Address Concerns: Actively listen to employees' questions and concerns. If you don't have a project email inbox yet, set one up today. Proactive feedback can save masses of time by highlighting potential issues early.
Empower Employees: Encourage participation and ownership of the change process. Whether through a more formal approach like a change agent network, or less formal approaches, supportive employees who champion change spread the message efficiently and positively.
4. Seek External Support
Consultants: Consider hiring external consultants with specialised knowledge or experience. Organisations often have a budgetary focus for savings. If your organisation is watching it's head count pennies, then there may be flexibility to structure your hiring as a statement of work or temporary labour Contract. Understand and access different budgetary sources for augmenting your team.
Partnerships: Collaborate with other organisations to share resources or expertise. Collaborations and partnerships often yield surprising, innovative results.
Mentorship: Connect with experienced leaders who can provide guidance and support. There may be leaders in the business who have encountered these exact problems before and can provide valuable advice. You can also hire mentors externally to operate as a sounding board and provide an external perspective into opportunities to save time or get more from existing resources.
Coaching: By upskilling existing team members, you gain immediate access to more productive outcomes. Team and individual coaching costs significantly less than hiring external consultants and provides targeted insight into specific strengths and weaknesses.
5. Measure and Adjust
Track Progress: Monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the change's effectiveness. Using metrics to guide the application of your scarce resources means you'll be applying effort to the most value-adding areas.
Identify Challenges: Be proactive in identifying and addressing potential obstacles. Enlist the entire team in the engagement plan and have everyone share their findings.
Make Adjustments: Be prepared to modify your approach as needed to ensure the change's success. This is a simple project management technique. If resourcing is insufficient for task, project managers will either delay the task or add more resources.
6. Stand Your Ground and Advocate for Adequate Resources
Be Assertive: Clearly articulate the need for additional resources to ensure the success of the change. While understanding that businesses are sometimes driven by cost imperatives to make changes with scarce resource, it is also a fact that there are only so many hours in the day; and only so much can be achieved before burning people out.
Provide Data: Back up your requests with data and evidence demonstrating the impact of under-resourcing. Benchmarking data from other organisations can be influential, as well as data and anecdotal experience from past successes and failures in the current organisation.
Seek Support: Build alliances with key stakeholders who can advocate for your needs. Engage your sponsor in the resourcing problem and explain how quality of outcomes may be impacted.
Be Persistent: Don't give up if your initial requests are denied. Continue to advocate for the resources necessary to achieve your goals. Even moving the dial a little will provide some relief and improve the performance of existing resources under stress or strain.
Not Enough Change Resources - At Scale
Managing large-scale change is a complex endeavour. Not enough change resource is a common predictor of low success in projects; insufficient resource at scale has the potential to multiply poor outcomes.
Managing change without sufficient resources in either the change team, and in the impacted teams can be a very tricky process. Prioritising, leveraging existing resources, fostering a supportive culture, seeking external support and advocating for the right level of resourcing to produce quality change outcomes over time can increase your chances of success.
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