What lessons can be learnt by business owners from the events at Terminal 5?
Implementing a major change in your business can be a daunting time, and rightly so. A lot more than your hopes for the future are pinned on it. The reputation of your business is also often at its mercy.
There are some key steps that you can take, particularly where any kind of technological change is concerned, to stop this kind of disaster occurring:
1. Planning is the glue that will hold everything together. Think carefully about how things are going to work and allow time to make sure everyone’s plans are going to be effective. It’s impossible to think of everything but too much change surfacing later on due to bad planning will cripple your project.
2. Good project management is the key, so find yourself an effective and creative project manager. Someone who will get their hands dirty and work with the team to sort things out when issues come up, not just collate everyone else’s actual effort and report it back to you once a week. And don’t believe them if they tell you they’ve brought every project they’ve done in on time and to budget, because general opinion is that over 95% of all business change projects have gone over on both, so they won’t be telling you the truth, and that’s a bad start to the arrangement. Better to find out what they did when things went wrong, and what strategies they employ to get back on track.
3. In these days of business reliance on computers, don’t forget that most business process changes mean you will need IT system changes, and vice versa. They go hand in hand and you need to ensure that they are dealt with as a concerted effort. If they don’t work together succesfully, your project will be doomed to failure.
4. Don’t set dates too aggressively. Most things usually takes longer than we expect them to and your project won’t be any different, so leave yourself some contingency to fix your unexpected issues - somewhere between 20 and 30 percent is normally a good place to start. Equally, costs normally overrun, because all those unexpected things will cost more, so allow plenty of contingency in your budget.
5. make sure you know the real story about how things are going. People don’t like giving bad news so no-one will want to tell you if it’s not looking good for your launch date. Often, it becomes exactly like the story of the emporer’s new clothes. You need to find a way to get to the truth, by showing them you really want to know what’s going on, won’t sack them if you hear bad news, and are prepared to do something about it. Also, try and find a key informer in the team, who you trust to give you the scoop, and keep in touch with them.
6. Use your team. Between them, they will have a lot of experience and knowledge, so put it to the best use by listening to what they have to say. If they think something might be wrong, you should pay attention and not ignore it, because they’re probably right.
7. Make sure you have a regular meeting with the key team members to review progress and any major risks and issues. Try and create an atmosphere of straight talk only, because that will help you get to the bottom of what problems might hold you back.
8. Equally, nothing can kill a project quicker than poor communication. Get an effective communications strategy in place early on, so that information can flow around the project team, and to you and your management team and back, with ease. As with everything, if everyone knows what they’re doing and why, you’ll have a greater chance of success.
9. A key part to any change project is controlled and thorough testing. changes to your processes and your systems need to be put through their paces at all the various points along the way, and by various people at each stage. Don’t skimp on testing because it is essential to understanding whether your changes are going to work, and what unanticipated issues there are hiding away. Your business people should be involved in their own phase of testing, called User Acceptance Testing or UAT, where they confirm that the system and business processes are fit for purpose.
To get the maximum benefit, testing must be done in a controlled way (i.e. like a scientific experiment, with controlled inputs and pre-determined outputs). A lot of people say they are testing when they are just ‘trying it out’, which simply can’t prove it will work in all the key scenarios for your business.
Also, you must make sure that, as well as testing parts of your process and system changes in isolation, they are also going to be tested altogether, in an end-to-end way. That’s often when the really important and surprising results come out.
So check the testing strategy carefully to confirm that the testing is going to be controlled and thorough.
10. Once problems have been found in testing, make sure you and your senior business people are involved in making decisions on which ones need to be fixed and which could be ‘lived with’. Research suggests that it can cost up to 20 times more to fix problems after launch than if you fix them during the development process, so you need to think carefully before putting things off.
Equally, having too many workarounds can really hamper a business, and won’t help you sell the benefits of the change to your staff, suppliers or customers.
11. When you get right up against your launch date, have a thorough review of the situation. Get everyone in a room, tell them you want straight talk only, and find out if the project is ready or not. Get to the truth and pay attention to any concerns people have.
If it doesn’t sound like everything is ready, then put it off. But not for a week - nothing can be done in a week. Put it off for at least a month, longer if necessary. If it’s not ready, don’t be tempted to rush it in and ’see what happens’. Headlines are made out of those decisions, when it all comes crashing down, and it won’t be good PR for you. People won’t forget it easily, either, because anything negative sticks in people’s minds.
12. Don’t cut corners and compromise on quality. The best things take time and money to get right. If you skimp, you’ll get what you paid for, and you’ll simply pay the price later on sorting it out.
13. Allow for extra support cover when your project launches, as there will be problems. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Put procedures in place that will help you identify, analyse and fix problems as soon as possible. And don’t be shy about admitting you might have some teething problems to your customers. They’ll appreciate your honesty and give you some leaway. But, if you keep them in the dark, they’ll be spitting blood if things go bad for them.
14. Contract staff are great - we use them all the time. But don’t rely on them too heavily for your project. They’ll disappear when it’s all over, and the knowledge of what went on and why will disappear with them, so keep a healthy balance of permanent staff on the team - a 60/40 split in favour of your own people is the minimum I would recommend.
Change is always a difficult beast to manage, but if these internal procedures are in place, by the time you come to launch in public you should appear reliable, professional and in control. As BA may discover to their cost, getting it wrong in the outside world is an expensive business.
Derrick Cameron is Managing Director of Eximium Ltd, who specialise in helping businesses use their IT to solve their business headaches. He has been in the IT industry for 20 years. For further information or advice on the use of IT in your business, please see www.eximium.net or call 01582 635 078.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 6:05 pm and is filed under Articles, Business Advice, IT Consultancy . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
