Steering Systematic Change

How programme management principles can guide transformation

Happy Tuesday, Transformation Friends. Another week, another opportunity to go Beyond the Status Quo.

Last week, I gave an overview of programme management, how it’s different from project management, and why it’s a good tool for our transformations that tend to live in environments of high VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity). It garnered a lot of interest from folks, so this week, we’ll look at programme management principles.

While these principles originate from the Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) framework, I think their relevance extends well beyond programme management. They provide a powerful foundation for transformation, helping to guide us toward innovation and advancement.

We’ll explore the seven principles from MSP and look at their broader context to transformation:

1. Lead with purpose

2. Collaborate across boundaries

3. Deal with ambiguity

4. Align with priorities

5. Deploy diverse skills

6. Realize measurable benefits

7. Bring pace and value

So grab your morning coffee and let’s look at each of these more closely.

Lead with purpose

Lead with Purpose is about maintaining a clear, unwavering focus on the desired outcomes. It goes beyond goal-setting. It guides the entire initiative with a robust vision that aligns every decision and action.

Leading with purpose is important because it serves as the anchor for our transformation. It ensures stakeholders are aligned to a clear direction, which helps decisions resonate broadly and effectively.

How to apply it:

It’s about aligning every step with our objectives and the outcomes we want to see.

• Clarity for Stakeholders: Forge a compelling vision, reiterated regularly to maintain alignment.

• Designing the Future State: Outline the desired outcome, encompassing operational dynamics and benefits to stakeholders.

• Financial Transparency: Ensure stakeholders understand financial aspects, reinforcing trust in the transformation's sustainability.

• Strategic Planning: Translate the vision into actionable steps, ensuring focused efforts.

• Knowledge Organization: Centralize and disseminate knowledge, fostering informed decision-making.

• Decision Infrastructure: Prioritize transparent, rationale-backed decision-making, ensuring stakeholders remain in the loop.

Collaborate across boundaries

Collaborate Across Boundaries is about cultivating seamless cooperation between diverse stakeholder groups. It goes beyond simple coordination. It’s more about harmonizing differing strategies, objectives, and cultures.

Collaborate Across Boundaries is important because it ensures harmonious progress in complex environments. Cohesive cross-organizational governance becomes crucial in these settings. This harmony safeguards the vision of our transformation, propelling all involved towards shared goals and incentives.

How to apply:

It’s about synchronizing efforts and driving towards shared goals.

• Facilitating Interaction: Establish platforms where various organizational units and stakeholders can voice opinions and make contributions.

• Articulating Benefits: Clearly communicate the advantages of the transformation, painting a picture of the desired state for everyone involved.

• Unified Financial Governance: Set transparent mechanisms for financial decision-making in place, ensuring that investments and priorities align with the collective objective.

• Resource Clarity: Be explicit about what resources are needed, their type, and their source.

• Knowledge Accessibility: Ensure all participants have access to relevant information and knowledge, enabling informed decisions.

• Unified Assurance View: Standardize assurance protocols across the board, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

• Decision-making Across Governance: Implement decision-making procedures for the diverse organizational structures involved, guaranteeing fluidity and coherence.

Deal with ambiguity

Deal with Ambiguity is about acknowledging the uncertainties in our transformation and emphasizing the significance of understanding and embracing these unknowns.

Deal with Ambiguity is important because it shifts perception, turning challenges into potential opportunities or threats. It gives us the foresight to identify risks and adapt to the dynamic nature of change. Through this, informed decisions emerge, driving progress even amidst uncertainty.

How to apply it:

Dealing with ambiguity doesn't mean eliminating uncertainty; it means leveraging it.

• Risk Appetite Definition: Determine how much your organization is willing to entertain risk. Foster an environment of transparent information exchange and base decisions on concrete evidence.

• Clear Vision of Risks: Always keep stakeholders informed about the current understanding of potential risks, ensuring everyone is aligned.

• Uncertainty in Business Cases: When drafting business cases, it's imperative to reflect the inherent uncertainties and specific risks.

• Manageable Delivery Tranches: Implement your transformation in manageable phases, ensuring each stage clearly contributes to the overall goal.

• Knowledge Accessibility: Ensure that knowledge is clear and readily available, allowing everyone involved to make informed decisions.

• Risk-based Assurance: Direct resources towards areas where clarity and certainty are pivotal. This approach makes sure that the most significant risks get the most attention.

• Consider Decision Impacts: Always weigh the potential positive and negative consequences when making decisions.

Align with priorities

Align with Priorities is about adapting in real-time to an organization's evolving goals and ensuring that transformation efforts remain relevant.

Align with Priorities is important because it demands recognition that priorities change due to a multitude of factors (e.g. new data, external changes, or political changes). Continually reevaluating our transformations ensures that they maintain value. When they don't anymore, it promotes that we move on to other endeavours.

How to apply it:

Aligning with priorities doesn't just keep an initiative on track, it also ensures the track itself is always the right one.

• Dynamic Oversight: Regularly review and adjust organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities to ensure they are in harmony with the current business operations and objectives.

• Reassess Design Elements: As information emerges, frequently re-evaluate expected benefits, the envisioned future state, and associated risks.

• Update Business Cases: Adapt the business case by integrating new data. This may include adjustments based on performance thus far, potential directional changes, modifications in cost and benefit projections, and risk profile alterations.

• Modify Delivery Tranches: Adapt the contents of your delivery phases to account for the latest data and insights.

• Empower Stakeholders: Facilitate access to essential knowledge and information, enabling stakeholders to effectively grasp and adapt to shifting priorities.

• Risk-Oriented Assurance: Focus assurance observations and subsequent action plans on the most current and pressing risks.

• Transparent Reporting: Maintain clarity by reporting on past performance and potential upcoming trends.

Deploy diverse skills

Deploy Diverse Skills is about creating a harmonious blend of both internal experience and external expertise, optimizing their combination to support transformational outcomes.

Deploy Diverse Skills is important because every role contributes uniquely to success. While external experts can provide nimble solutions to complex challenges, balancing this with nurturing internal talent is vital to ensure sustained organizational capability and growth.

How to Apply it:

We want to create robustness in the face of change and plant seeds for the organization's future growth and adaptability.

• Oversight and Development: Regularly assess and monitor the development of required capabilities and resource capacities.

• Clear Skill Identification: Understand and communicate the competencies essential for new operational designs to function seamlessly.

• Budget Transparency: Clearly itemize any incremental costs arising from leveraging specialized skills, whether internally or externally sourced.

• Resource Planning: Strategize delivery, ensuring that resources are mixed and matched to align best with the intended benefits.

• Knowledge Access: Ensure every stakeholder, irrespective of their position, has the resources and information necessary to execute their roles effectively.

• Balanced Assurance: Ensure assurance activities have the necessary resources, considering factors like independence, specialized expertise, and cost-effectiveness.

• Data Analysis: Continually monitor and predict impacts on an organization's capacity to achieve planned outcomes, adapting strategies based on these insights.

Realize measurable benefits

Realize Measurable Benefits is about introducing changes and ensuring that these transformations lead to tangible outcomes. It emphasizes the integration of new or improved capabilities into our daily business, all while focusing on benefits that can be quantified and evaluated.

This principle is important to transformation because clear, quantifiable gains guide our direction. Whether these benefits translate to financial gains or other tangible measures, their realization marks the success of our initiative. Proactive management of both positive and challenging outcomes ensures the overall path is toward significant growth.

How to Apply it:

For a transformation to be meaningful and valuable, it must be validated by the measurable benefits it delivers.

• Stakeholder Engagement: Engage key participants and ensure open, two-way communication about the anticipated benefits.

• Benefit Design: Create a detailed map and profile of the expected benefits, offering a clear view of what's aimed for.

• Measurement Methodology: Ensure every financial or otherwise benefit is quantifiable. This could mean direct monetary gains, proxy measures, or other non-financial metrics.

• Outcome Embedment: Integrate beneficial outcomes systematically, aligning with intermediate objectives or milestones.

• Knowledge Sharing: Ensure all relevant parties are informed about the benefits, how they're defined, and how they will be evaluated.

• Assurance Focus: Direct assurance efforts towards risks that might impact the eventual realization of these benefits over time.

• Decision-making: Maintain the spotlight on the broader picture. Decisions should always revolve around the final realization of the benefits envisaged.

Bring pace and value

Bring Pace and Value is about ensuring each transformational step moves forward and adds tangible value at an appropriate cadence. It emphasizes that pace isn't just about speed but aligning tasks with broader organizational goals to synchronize both transformative and routine changes effectively.

Bring Pace and Value is important because efficiency and efficacy are central to successful transformations. Aligning transformation speed with organizational objectives ensures consistent value delivery without disrupting core operations. This approach optimizes investments, giving stakeholders an early return on their trust and resources.

How to Apply it:

To get both pace and value, organizations need to intertwine detailed planning in parallel with efficient execution.

• Empowered Governance: Establish a governance structure that places decision-making as close to operational levels as feasible.

• Clarity and Prioritization: Keep the overarching vision, anticipated benefits, and operational goals rational and in sync with organizational priorities.

• Financial Articulation: Express the design and sequence of the initiative in fiscal terms. This financial perspective helps highlight how expenditure timelines and benefits realization align with the desired pace of implementation.

• Strategic Delivery Planning: Plot the delivery of capabilities at an optimal speed, ensuring that the desired outcomes coincide with the business case's objectives.

• Continual Learning: Cultivate a culture that values lessons learned from past experiences, promoting a mindset of constant improvement.

• Timely Assurance: Ensure the assurance processes are well-timed, relevant, and provide valuable feedback at necessary junctures.

• Clear Authority Delegation: Work within defined authority boundaries, escalating decisions only when absolutely necessary.

Wrap up

Drawing from the MSP framework, these principles serve as pillars for any transformative journey.

As you step into the rest of your week, take a moment to reflect:

• How can you apply these principles in your ongoing projects or future transformations?

• Which principles do you see as resonating most strongly in your current environment? What lessons could you share with others about them?

• What principles do you see as the biggest challenge in your current environment? What would you need to change to incorporate them into your culture?

Until next time, I'll see you Beyond the Status Quo.