What a difference a day makes

All transformations need a strategy, Rule 1. We all know that, but it can often be extremely daunting when you’re in World of Problem to know just how to step over the line into World of Plan. But in fact, all you need to do is give it a day.

Spending just one day asking and answering the right questions will be all you need to get your basic strategy and embryonic plan onto paper. Here’s what I’d suggest:

Avengers Assemble: Get the right people in a room for one day with no distractions. Any minute now, doing this will actually become legal again.

You’ll need all the key players in your project: such as the person who will be your Executive Sponsor; a person representing your customer(s); function owners, such as the people who believe they own the processes involved; and your key do-ers.

Ban their phones and tablets. Confiscate these if necessary. You want their full attention, just for today. Explain that no-one leaves the room until we have a strategy and a headline plan. Collaboration, decisiveness and positive thinking is therefore the quickest way they’ll get their phones back and be out of here…

Immovable object-ive: The most important thing you need the group to agree today is the objective for the Programme. You’ll need to get them to agree what we are trying to achieve with this transformation – but stated in five words or less. If you’re interested in this, there’s more below on how to frame an objective in: https://www.ignitiontransformation.co.uk/objective-perspective

It’s only five words, but it may take a fair amount of time to get there. That’s time well spent, as the Programme objective will be the key yardstick you use to keep the Programme on track, potentially for months or years to come. Getting agreement on it (and having the key players remember they created it) will be key to governing the project as it progresses. It’s the stick you’ll use to keep everyone in line: so they need to own that stick.

Name the date. Next, set the completion deadline. If you’re lucky, some external force may be setting this deadline for you – perhaps it’s the date the company has set for selling-off the part of the business you’re working on. But most transformations aren’t lucky enough to have a scarily-close immutable deadline. These are in a much more vulnerable position…

That’s because so many programmes drift, creep or fail because the end-date is constantly shifting. Deadline-drift means early promises are soon broken and the Programme loses credibility within the business; and the Programme’s internal focus seeps away.

Therefore, I’d strongly advise setting an ambitious-but-realistic deadline right here and now. Ignore false constraints – such as company financial year-end or calendar year-end. Instead, work out how long it will realistically take and pick that. If it means the benefits will fall into only half a financial year, that’s the case the Executive Sponsor is going to have to be happy making to the Board.

Fix the price: This tends not to take long – largely because most people have already been told by the Board that the transformation has to come in within a specific budget. But if that isn’t the case, I’d recommend naming a reasonable sake-of-argument figure at this stage and seeing if we can make it work as the day’s decisions progress. As Programme Lead, just be sure to come prepared with some research into back-of-a-fag-packet costs.

With these first three topics in place, you may have taken most of the morning, but you’re now clear on What, When and How Much – the three most important cornerstones of your strategy. The details – The What – come next….

Define deliverables. You’ll now need to identify the key deliverables – the must-haves - which will be dictated by the objective, the budget and the deadline. Given what you need to achieve, what do you do? And what can you do?

The team now needs to agree what MUST be in place for the Programme to be deemed a success by the deadline date. Never mind the would-likes and nice-to-haves at this stage. We’re looking only for the key deliverables.

That’ll involve a good deal of horse trading and possibly a spot of arm-wrestling. One woman’s must-have is another man’s would-like… A trick is to set a time-limit on deciding this part: and because the participants are starting to pine for their emails, they’ll very likely comply.

Resource, of course:  Resourcing would take forever if we were writing a full project plan. But remember, at this stage we’re not – we’re just creating a simple strategy and headline plan. So don’t get hung up on how-many-business-analysts-we’ll-need-in-June.

All you need is a plan for getting to the proper plan – how do we need to resource the project to get it started? Who are the lead players we now need to find? Are they available internally or will we need some from outside? Again, this is not a lengthy discussion of the merits of all possible candidates, from Abigail to Zoe – it’s about identifying the presence or absence of skillsets.

It’s fine to refine: By now, it should be no later than 3pm. Because you’ll need some time to review your decisions and refine your ideas. Decisions made early may need to be reconsidered in the light of thinking done later. So go over each decision in your plan and check it still stacks up.

I tend to find that this exercise is a quick and effective way of adding useful refinements. For example, the later thinking, when brought to bear on e.g. the deadline, starts to put more flesh on the bones. So the original agreement, featuring one start date and one end date, will magically develop rather obvious stage-dates, just like that!

Hometime: And now, after that recap-and-refine, it’s hometime. Everyone is enormously pleased with themselves, feeling progress has been made and says have been had. And all achieved in just one day: marvellous!

That’s because we’ve missed a bit. A big bit. A lot of very big bits. You see, we’ve not really discussed The How. We haven’t discussed the solutions we need; the products we might look at; the vendors we might choose; the team we might hire; the persuasion this will require; the training we’ll need to do; the colour of the carpet in the training room…

That’s deliberate. Because we don’t need to do that on Day 1. That’s for later, and possibly even for a completely different group of decision-makers.

Most planning sessions become fraught or inconclusive because people try to agree too much at once. As a starting point, not only do you just NEED one day to get a strategy and outline plan, but it would be foolish to spend any MORE than a day on the first pass. Get the basics down; then identify the details slice by slice, later. But that’s a story for another day….

Ignition Transformation’s SPARC service helps organisations define their transformation strategy and plan. We guide teams through the decision-making process and offer information and advice on what will be required. More information can be found at:

https://www.ignitiontransformation.co.uk/problems-we-solve-getting-started