August 2005 - Library

14
James Reyes-Picknell and Aileen Reyes-Picknell
Conscious Management Incorporated (Canada)
Many organizations attempt to introduce changes in the way they operate and do business only to meet with disappointing results.
Up to 60% of some major corporate initiatives fail to achieve their objectives and many of those leave the organization with disgru n t l e d
employees and disappointed executives. Even where the programs are well managed and change management is not short changed
as it often is, the programs are at risk and some still fail. Organizations and what happens within them is a result of choices made
by those leading them and leading the changes as well as the choices made by all those who will feel the impact of the change.
Getting that high degree of buy-in from all these people is much more than an exercise in communication. This paper summarizes
what often happens and how to avoid it.
Article
When Change
Doesn’t Work
It is an understatement to say that companies have a hard time getting new systems, procedures and processes to work. Large
enterprise computing systems provide a notable example where up to 60 % of the implementations fail to achieve the benefits that
w e re expected. In many of those cases the technology itself usually works and IT argues that the implementations were a success.
They are probably right too! It’s not the system that doesn’t work; it’s that it doesn’t get used as intended. Something went wrong
with the program of change that supported the implementation.
Many other corporate programs suffer the same fate: TQM, TQC, 6-Sigma, Balanced Score Card, TPM, RCM, CRM, SCM, etc.
Corporate-wide and even small localized improvement initiatives that entail change to the way people work, often fail. Why?
Managers often argue that the reasons for failure were beyond their control. While that is often true, it is also true that the re a s o n s
were under control of someone somewhere in the company - the company as a whole wasn’t choosing to succeed in some way.
There are many well documented reasons for failure of these large change programs. Here are some for large IT implementation
projects:
• Inadequate requirements definition.
• Poor package selection.
• Inadequate resources assigned to do the work.
• Lack of any change management approach.
• Lack of top management commitment.
• Underestimating the time and effort required.
• Redesigning processes to fit the software, not the other way around.
• Overstating benefits and ROI.
• Inadequate training and education of the users.
• Flawed project design and management.
• Poor communications.
• Cost cutting measures such as “big bang” go-live strategies.
All of these are under control somewhere in the company, if not the project manager himself. But, it takes the entire company to
truly choose success, not just some parts of it.
Even where experts in change management have been used and everything appears to be done properly, the changes can still fail.
Why? We must now peel away the surface layers to uncover what has really gone wrong.
It is necessary to go deeper into the psyche of the company to understand why, despite doing all the right things, it still chose failure .
What are the underlying factors that could derail even a well managed and seemingly well implemented project?