Case Study: Plan2Win

A public company with ~$1B in revenue created a Business Transformation Office to deliver 7 enterprise projects: 3 IT, 4 operations.

Every ELT meeting included references to other top priority projects that leaders were assigning their limited resources to. The result was employees who were overwhelmed by the amount of change, the shifting prioritization, and the never-ending fire drills to deliver “just one more thing.”

To solve this, the BTO led a planning and prioritization process with the ELT to:

1. Identify ALL enterprise projects/programs
2. Develop a common framework to evaluate head-to-head with defined criteria
3. Gather project information from subject matter experts and validate with BTO and finance
4. Use quantitative and qualitative data to group and prioritize
5. De-prioritize several projects 
6. Confirm roadmap of prioritized projects (and which were de-prioritized) with PE sponsors and board of directors
7. Communicate with the entire organization and begin change management plan

Large corporation was several years into a massive go to market transformation, having already completed extensive analysis, gained executive buy-in, developed a sales force plan, established new KPIs.

Six months prior to launch, as the rest of the organization was informed of the impending changes, the project team started to hear from IT, operations and support teams that the change was “impossible,” systems would “break,” processes would “fail.”

The project team was unable to determine which objections were legitimate vs. inconvenient, which consequences would be debilitating vs. painful, and what other issues loomed. As a result, each was considered a significant threat to the project, overwhelming the project team. The executive considered cancelling the go-to-market change, scrapping the work that had been done and foregoing the financial benefit that was projected. 

The solution was a project-in-a-project using a structured approach:

1. Develop a comprehensive list of corporate functions and IT systems
2. Clear description of the desired outcome (vs. a fixed solution to achieve the outcome)
3. Detailed assessment and classification of the proposed change on functions and systems, working with subject matter experts (45 operations areas reduced to five critical and three moderate concerns; review of 37 IT systems identified two critical challenges and seven moderate)
4. Project plan with workstreams prioritized by level of concern
5. Resources (people, time, budget, executive influence) aligned by priority
6. Project team and subject matter experts assigned to solve, not just manage outstanding issues

Note: while this is a case for Manage2WinTM, it is obvious in retrospect that Change2WinTM would have identified areas of concern earlier in the project. Because the project team waited until close to launch before communicating the change to operations and IT teams, they were surprised by the challenges and caught without enough time to solve before the scheduled launch date.

Private equity-back company, operating nationwide, had experienced several years of rapid growth through acquisitions of small, local entities.

The historical model of local control, decision-making and communication was changing to a centralized model, but lacked the structure to reach all employees. The result was that most of the company’s 10,000 employees were not aware of the transformational changes taking place. Without an understanding of the long-term vision, the logic behind the changes, the timing and the impact, employees in local offices (and even some in the corporate headquarters) reacted with fear and resistance.

The solution was to develop a network of change champions across the organization to lead the change from the inside out. Change champions were top performers from every function, nominated by their leaders and recognized by the CEO. They received extra training from experts in change management and helped to develop a change toolkit that included: 

• monthly update meetings
• open group chat to ask each other questions
• access to BTO program leaders
• templates/pre-written communications to engage their teams

Additional resources included a company-wide change roadmap, Prosci ADKAR® Model[1], multi-channel communications plans for each program, online training materials (videos, FAQs, help).

[1] Source: https://www.prosci.com/methodology/adkar. The Prosci ADKAR® Model is one of the two foundational models of the Prosci Methodology. The word “ADKAR” is an acronym for the five outcomes an individual needs to achieve for a change to be successful: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.