How to Deliver Effective Change?
Published May 13, 2024
- Corporate Finance & HR, Risk & Procurement
- Life Sciences
Investing in change within businesses has always been important. Research consistently shows that focusing on aspects such as digital transformation and revolutionizing the client experience can improve economic outcomes by almost 50%, and can also increase customer satisfaction by up to 30%.
Why should I be thinking about enhancing change performance?
Organisations frequently find that delivering change effectively can be a challenge and too often restricts the business from achieving its goals and potential. Common challenges we see from our clients include:
- “We don’t have the capacity to deliver the change required to meet our strategic objectives.”
- “Delivering change is cumbersome and expensive, how do we measure ROI or value for money from our change function.”
- “The priorities of the change organisation do not align with the business strategy and thus the change portfolio is being poorly prioritised.”
- “Too many projects in our portfolio are red or amber and we don’t know what the path to green looks like.”
Change can cause issues at all levels in your business
In the event that change delivery activities do not reflect the needs and priorities of the business, improving the alignment between key organisational stakeholders will drive better outcomes and enable delivery of the business strategy.
In order to gain confidence that the change agenda is delivering value for money, organisations can reduce the cost of change without having to stop delivery of the inflight portfolio through improved delivery capability.
Many organisations struggle to meet the demand of the business, preventing them from delivering their transformation agenda. Managing capacity of resources is one of the main issues companies fail to do well – increasing headcount isn’t always the answer. A better understanding of the portfolio combined with an improved scheduling process will drastically improve the likelihood of delivering the full change agenda
Just bringing the organisation up to a consistent level of delivery capability will drive dramatic results in delivering the portfolio more effectively. From there you can look to build higher quality delivery at a faster pace with modern ways of working and tooling.
What can you do to solve these issues?
Assess your change environment as a whole – Review elements of your change environment to understand how the ecosystem is functioning. This will help you to identify ways to do more; more cost-effective activity, yielding higher quality outcomes, at a faster pace.
Understand how your capability compares – Assess your change capability against internal performance, or industry if available, to gather insights and meaningful comparisons and understand where to focus your efforts for improvement.
Review, rationalise and prioritise better – Get a better understanding of the full scope of your change agenda in order to understand where the pressure points are in the portfolio and what the impact of stopping or diverting resources will be.
Divert attention to initiatives that need it – Identify the critical initiatives that are under-performing and find a path to green to ensure delivery of desired outcomes to budget and time.
How organizations have solved their change challenges with Wavestone’s help
Following a strategic review, this organisation identified the need to reduce the cost of change, and increase the efficiency of their change function across both the business and IT. In order to unlock the potential for material cost savings, a number of solutions were recommended which, combined, had the potential to deliver 30% savings via efficiency gains. These also enabled the organisation to embrace modern delivery approaches (e.g. Agile) and more strategic offshoring and 3rd party engagement.
This organisation was concerned about the quality and timeliness of its global change delivery, and a growing disconnect between IT, strategy, and the business teams. Wavestone was able to help to transform their global change environment, with a new change framework and governance model. For the first time they had visibility of change investment ROI and clear and reliable MI to inform future priorities.
This FTSE 250 organisation operated a distributed change model with a mix of internal and external change resources with critical business change teams globally. Facing significant cost challenges in a heavily competitive market, we designed a location strategy to co-locate teams, improve efficiency, minimise exposure to regulatory and political risk – without impacting business.
This UK Card Merchant and Issuer had to enhance the protection of its customers card data. The programme had failed to meet key milestones and was reporting as ‘Red’ and required a turn-around. In order to do this, we focused on enhancing the programme governance, improving programme planning, identifying key risks and gaps and defining the path back to ‘Green’. The programme was successfully recovered and delivered the desired outcomes and led to the mobilisation of a key element of ‘business and operational readiness’.
Author
-
Ben Dineen
Associate Partner – UK, London
Wavestone
LinkedIn