Valuable Change

What You Need to Know to Ensure Your Change Pays Off

Brendon Baker

• Publisher: Quality Project Initiative
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780645122725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Corporate Governance
• Index: Business

WHAT EVERY CHANGE LEADER NEEDS TO KNOW

We are in a crisis!

85% of the change initiatives in your organisation could be worthless... Throwing money at an unknown result. They aren't just accepting ambiguity; they are driving off a cliff, blindfolded and hoping the car flies.

...But I get it. The alternatives are just too hard. The industry has over-complicated it. From obtuse jargon to complex spiderweb maps that are stuck in the weeds. No one has time for that!

But what if there was a better approach? Something a little...Simpler?...Easier?

Valuable Change is a Change Leader's complete handbook to setting up, driving and realising truly Valuable Change.

Valuable Change provides you with what you need to set the best possible course for your change. You will soon be ramping up the return on your projects, turning outcomes into reality, generating untold momentum, and eliminating fluffy paper claims. When you are running valuable change projects, you can say goodbye to: slow project start-ups, unwieldy plans, teams stuck in despair, communities and training that just doesn't work, and the endless teams of graduates sitting in dark rooms staring at spreadsheets.

You can expect:

• Massive Improvements Across Your Project ROI
• Huge Time Savings for Execs, Project Managers, Delivery Teams and PMOs
• Career-Defining Reputational Boosts

Plus:

• The Secret to Faster, Cheaper, More Consistent Project Success
• Two Insanely Powerful Shortcuts To Generating Change Buy-In
• The Value Equation that Underpins All Change Adoption
• The Heart of Clear Decision Making in Projects
• The Antidote to Overzealous Bureaucracy
• How to Build Momentum, Leverage Community, and Create Valuable Fanaticism

and more...

Stop wasting time and money. It's time to make the shift to truly Valuable Change.

See you inside.

Part One:
Your Change

 

Chapter 1:
Ask the Right Questions

The Essence of a Valuable Project

OK, let’s get straight to the heart of the matter. What makes a change valuable?

In short – A Valuable Change is one that solves a key organisational need or desire. It’s truly as simple as that.

The trick is ensuring that your change actually solves that need or desire, and this is where the art of asking the right questions becomes your key tool. A concise and considered answer to all three Valuable Questions is crucial for creating a great return on your project investment.

 

Don’t Fall into The Money Trap

But first… I want you to close your eyes with me for a moment and imagine yourself sitting outside the board room of one of the largest retail chains in Australia. Maybe you’re nervous, sitting there fidgeting with your pen. Or perhaps you’re a slick operator, sitting in a calm silence. Either way, you know this is not going to be a fun meeting. You are about to break some devastating news to the CEO and Owner. To make it worse, this is a man not known for his patience or good nature.

You are about to inform him that the half a billion-dollar portfolio of projects that you’ve been asked to audit is on track to deliver only 50% of its expected financial return…

Finally, the door opens, and your name is called. You walk in and greet the room.

As a seasoned professional, you warm the room up with some good humour and your positive findings.

“The projects are delivering well. Systems and processes are, on the whole, on track.”

…Then you break the news.

“The expected financial benefits across the portfolio were over estimated. By a factor of 2 to 1.”

There is silence… An awkward stillness fills the room. Then your intuition detects something. Your brain switches to slow-motion as you hear a noise... a ‘whooshing’ noise, that seems to be getting louder. Then you start to see it out of the corner of your eye… a shiny object comes hurtling at your head.

What do you do?

Tell me, would your first reaction be to duck? Because if so, then you may well have been as lucky as a friend of mine was in this exact situation. He too managed to dodge the glass jug that was thrown at him by this short-tempered CEO. My friend’s quick reactions saved him from a potentially large hospital stay, reducing the damage to just a broken water jug and a cracked window.

This is a story of a CEO who deeply understands that every change initiative is an investment. The feeling was particularly acute for this man as it was his personal wealth that was invested with the organisation. Where this CEO missed the mark, well aside from the physical violence, was that he got so caught up in the financial return.

And this is how we arrive at the first common misconception we challenge in this book: As each change initiative is an investment, many leaders get caught in the trap of always expecting a money-based return.

The reality is that value doesn’t always come in the form of tangible cost savings or increased revenue. Sometimes an organisation wants to shift its culture, or stop using an IT system that people don’t like, or improve its customer experience, or make some other shift to set itself up for the future. There are also times when an organisation isn’t focused internally – perhaps it’s investing for the betterment of a vulnerable community or other philanthropic goal. The key to all these elements is that a project needs to be solving an organisational need or desire. The art here is in figuring out what it’s going to do to solve it, and how it’s going to prove it has done so.

A Common Trap

A common trap that Government and Not-For-Profit (NFP) organisations fall into is requiring their projects to have a financial return. These organisations often get caught up in purely mathematical exercises to demonstrate the millions of different ways that the Government or NFP will be more efficient after the project delivers its work.

Interestingly, the polar opposite of this trap is also equally found through Government and NFP organisations – the dangerous thinking that “We aren’t profit-driven, so we don’t need to prove we invested the money well”.

Neither of these are useful positions.

 

Learning from Failure

My key aim in this chapter is to illustrate the power of asking and then answering the right questions. What better way to do that than to look at what happens when the right questions are ignored? There are a multitude of examples we could draw on for that, but to really illustrate it, I’ve found us an elephant of a project.

In 2006 the Australian New South Wales (NSW) State Government Department of Education started one of its largest undertakings ever – the Learning Management and Business Reform project (known more widely as LMBR). The LMBR project was inherently ambitious in nature. It aimed to replace a 15-year old cluster of expensive and no longer suitable backend and learning management systems across the Department itself, 2230 public schools and its vocational TAFE³ sites. The expected total cost for the project was $483 Million. Expected total time: 8 years.

The project progressed well for its first few years, delivering some early wins all within expectations. All seemed OK from the outside looking in.

It wasn’t until late 2014, as the project was nearing its expected end date, that a bombshell dropped. It was revealed that the project was overspent and not even close to done. In fact, delving deeper, after the preceding years and circa $530 Million, the Department had only partially delivered its solution to 229 of the 2230 schools. Just 10% of its target result at an already notable cost overrun. Unfortunately, even luck was not on the project’s side, with public outcries by the Public Service Association (the workers’ union) to halt the rollout – citing major system flaws and huge additional workloads for the staff at those 229 schools that had received the new system.

If we ratchet forward a further four years to 2018, with continued time and cost slippage, and more public embarrassment on the way (including misplacing $525M in TAFE revenue in 2016); we arrive at the end of the LMBR journey. The final result: a 12-year project (50% longer than the original time estimate), and $755 Million in spend (+56% more than originally planned).

While there isn’t direct audit data available for 2018, the key findings in the 2014 audit were that: “The Department [had] yet to demonstrate that it [would] achieve [any] expected benefits”⁴.

If we temporarily put aside the fact that this project likely made some consulting partners very wealthy⁵, LMBR is a great example of what happens when a project doesn’t answer and link the three key Questions that underpin a Valuable Change. So, like a forensic analyst, let’s delve deeper. Let’s conduct a procedural autopsy of their failures to give us useful insight into why each of the Valuable Questions truly create Valuable Change.

Valuable Question One: Why Are We Doing It?

“Very few people or companies can clearly articulate WHY they do what they do. …People don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.”

- Simon Sinek

In the quote above, Simon clicks into why the first Valuable Question is “Why Are We Doing It?”. In short – there are two reasons it’s absolutely crucial to answer this question clearly as early as we possibly can.

1) First is that, unless you’re on the bleeding edge of ‘cool tech’, no one is motivated by what you’re doing. And, even if you are on the bleeding edge, not everyone is motivated by future tech. It’s the WHY you’re doing it that drives engagement. Get this right and you will find that winning stakeholder buy-in becomes dramatically easier. Seriously, we are talking a night and day level of difference here. Whether this is in trying to convince investment boards to allocate you funding, or explaining why your new restructure is a good idea for the 650 staff affected – a clear WHY makes your life easier.

2) The second amazing thing that happens when you answer this Valuable Question is that you automatically start to build in regular checks on the project’s viability. By this I mean, you start asking the logical follow-up question – “Does this project still make sense?”. It’s this one-two punch combination of questions that will have one of the largest impacts on driving up your project return on investment while simultaneously cutting down your project lengths.

Getting to Your Project’s WHY

Unfortunately, our elephant – the LMBR Project - failed to capitalise on either of the awesome advantages of answering the project ‘WHY’. Let’s explore.

Let’s first look at the LMBR’s formal stated project ‘WHY’.

The department stated that ‘the reasons for proceeding with the LMBR program were that the existing finance, human resources, payroll and student administration systems were over 15 years old, technically obsolete, complex, costly to maintain, and did not meet the Department’s business requirements.’

Anyone excited yet? No? Hmm... Maybe if we go on it’ll get a little better:

‘There were over 100 applications being used by schools and TAFEs to [supplement the existing systems’ deficiencies]. This meant there was duplication of effort and inefficient and inconsistent manual processes across the Department. The LMBR program was designed to address these issues.’

Can you hear a strong enough call for a $750 Million spend and 12 years of effort in any of the above? Because I can’t. It seems that LMBR had a clarity of ‘WHY’ problem. Simply put – having an old system is not a good...

Table of contents

• A Quick Note from the Author
• Introduction
• About Valuable Change
• What You Are Going to Get From This Book
• Part One: Your Change
• Chapter 1: Ask the Right Questions
• Don’t Fall into The Money Trap
• Learning from Failure
• Valuable Question One: Why Are We Doing It?
• Valuable Question Two: How Will We Prove It?
• Valuable Question Three: What Are We Doing?
• The Top Four Mistakes Projects Make
• Chapter 2: Have A Spine
• Build the Core
• SO WHAT – Creating Your VQM
• PROOF – How You Plan to Show Off
• HOW – Answering the ‘Delivery 6’
• Chapter 3: Drive the Core
• The Power of A Better Platform
• Driver Aid 1: Valuable Decisions
• Driver Aid 2: The Learning Habit
• Driver Aid 3: Simplest Practical Artefacts (SPAs)
• The Truth About Driver’s Aids
• Part Two: Your People
• Chapter 4: Stack The Value Equation
• Why We Do Things (Or Don’t)
• Stacking the Equation in Your Favour: A Sustainable Reward
• Stacking the Equation in Your Favour: The PITA Factor
• Deploying The Value Equation In Your Change
• Gamification: The Art of Creating New Rewards
• A Final Note On A Valuable Mindset
• Chapter 5: Rally Your People
• The Better, More Effective Way: The VP Approach
• Identifying Where You (and Your Team) Are
• Strategies To Level Up
• Maintaining High Momentum
• Chapter 6: Forge Influential Champions & Communities
• Identify and Enlist Internal Influencers: Find the Right People in Your Organisation to Recruit to Your Cause
• Engage & Grow through Community: The Essence of A Great Community
• But Wait There’s More! Bonus Tactic: How To Truly Shift Capability
• Rallying is Hard Work
• Chapter 7: Value Balance Your Change Support
• The Secret Behind Effective Change Support
• An Imbalanced Equation
• Breaking The Cycle
• The Path To The High Value Service Cycle
• A Final Note on Change Support
• Part Three: Your Next Move
• Chapter 8: Shift To Valuable Change
• Ripple Area 1: Your Change Core
• Ripple Area 2: Inside Your Change
• Valuable Change is a Journey not a Destination
• Chapter 9: TL;DR: Valuable Change In A Nutshell
• Your Change
• Your People
• Your Next Move – Shift To Valuable Change
• Acknowedgements
• Acknowledgements
• About The Author: Brendon Baker