Conventional methods implement the costs of change and prevent benefits. Benefit from change through R-pM.

Many of us have participated in business change projects. I am sure that we share many experiences with the difficulties in gaining successful business change. We have read about many cases of problems and disasters. Why after all this experience and the many stories of unsuccessful business change, do we continue to have problems? For a start:

- We continue to employ bad methods for business change. No one has ever put forward a good method

- We do what everyone else is doing, to implement the same problems as everyone else

- We employ conventional wisdom, which automatically introduces bad decisions

- Our enterprise is not structured to plan and manage benefits, support new solutions in operation, or ensure good performance from the solution

Let’s go through business change step by step. What was the objective of business change? Likely, there is a nominal objective like increasing revenues, reducing costs, or improving customer service. What is the basis of this objective? Precisely how is the new solution to be used to produce benefits that add up to the nominal objectives and provide the return? This rarely is defined.

If the nominal objective is just words, what is the implementation team trying to do. Often they will say their objective is performance improvement. Should that be the objective? Conventional wisdom says yes, but how do you feel when someone tells you, you need to improve your performance or that consultants are coming in to improve our performance?

But, in the end, even performance improvement proves hard to define, so the objective comes down to something that every one involved can understand – - “solution implementation”.

Is solution implementation the proper objective? Conventional wisdom says it is, but I think most of us recognize that it is not. But, none of us is sure of what the objective should be.

Certainly, when consultants get involved, the objective is solution implementation. They likely proposed a methodology that they can employ to convert the business over to the new solution.

So, if consultants were involved, who ended up managing the day to day implementation – - the enterprise project manager or the consultant project manager? Likely it was up to the consultants because that is conventional wisdom and the enterprise does not have the capability or experience with business change. So, who was appointed enterprise project manager? Was it a manager involved in increasing revenues or improving customer service? Or, was it the administrative manager supporting the solution?

Likely, the administrative manager was appointed project manager, since that is the conventional wisdom. What was the role of the enterprise project manager? It likely boiled down to providing the solution requirements, which is what the consultant wants. The nominal consultant objective is to satisfy user requirements and to do what the customer wants, which conventional wisdom says are proper objectives.

So what are the requirements of the administrative project manager? Does the administrative manager know what is needed to improve revenues or customer service? Is the administrative manager interested in really reducing costs, when it means reducing their own staff? Who developed the old solution or gains a technical authority from the old solution? So, chances are the requirements boiled down to one – - “no change”.

So then, the project went through the steps of the methodology. Acquire the solution, set up the solution, train on the solution, implement the solution, accept solution, and operate the solution. But, all these steps just incur costs. Where are the steps for planning and achieving benefit?
During all this, what happened if there was an exception, advanced need, or a problem that was not addressed? These likely were put off to the future or left “up to the users”, since the objective is implementation.

What happens when it comes to acceptance? Well, the main requirement of the administrative project manager was met. And, the manager would look bad if delays or controversies were introduced. So implementation is signed off and the project is complete.
But what remains:

- Were advanced or future period features ever implemented?

- Was the old solution completely removed, or is it still operated to handle the exceptions?

- Is the new solution utilized to increase revenues, reduce costs, or improve customer service? Does anyone understand how to use the new solution to do more than what was done before?

- Was a responsibility established to ensure that the new solution is utilized to produce benefit?

- Was a capability established to support and improve the solution?

- Was a method established to track and measure the return on the investment in the new solution?

- How many old performance problems were implemented as part of the new solution? What is the cost of change now?

- Are the users who face the customer, enthusiastic about the new solution?

Many enterprises have had implementations where they implemented the cost of business change and received, at the most, marginal benefit.

Even if the enterprise follows an implementation or conventional business change method the best that it can, it will still be implementing the cost of business change. Conventional methods manage change and development through contrived entities rather than business reality. No conventional method can enable the methodical development of the benefit of business change, since enterprises are not structured to plan, manage, and track the benefits. Until they are structured properly to manage business reality, enterprises will continue to implement the cost of business change.

This problem is eliminated by Result-performance Management (R-pM), a new management breakthrough now being launched. R-pM provides the answer by structuring enterprise results and performance to enable result-performance development. The benefits of the investment come from result development; the costs of investment come from performance development. The payback from investments come from the increase in result value-added (result value less performance costs) compared to the result value-added with no investment, over the payback period.

So, stop implementing the cost of business change. Implement the benefit of business change by becoming a 21st century enterprise with R-pM.

By: H. Greene

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