One feature of successful transformation programmes is that their executive leadership
are prepared to listen to and pragmatically deal with a variety of experts from different disciplines and organisations. Capturing the experiences of those who have travelled the transformation journey several times before is vital to understanding the levers of success and avoiding the common pitfalls which can lead to failure. Whether news is good or bad, strong leadership requires the maturity of considered response before clear direction is set……..and stuck to.
Experts can be expensive and as most organisations don’t possess bottomless transformation budgets, it is important to deploy them impactfully. There are many areas where expertise will add value to your transformation strategy – this blog will discuss some of the key ones and offer some tips on how to gain best value from the experts you employ.
Where are experts vital?
Proposition Phase: successfully shaping the transformation needs, strategy, objectives and the business case are the foundations upon which great transformations are built. The solidity of the overall ‘proposition’ can benefit greatly from expertise in the commercial, business or technology areas involved as well as from experts in the initiation of transformation programmes. The proposition stage is the point at which the most influence on success can be brought to bear: get it right and the other phases will flow naturally; miss the mark and correction can be time-consuming and costly.
Planning Phase: a good planning phase will be iterative and overlap the Proposition Phase, allowing the proposition to be tempered by the reality of planning constraints and feedback from planning inputs and thought processes. Transformation experts understand that top-down planning and bottom-up estimating must be allowed to meet in the middle, arriving at a robust road map with a set of accompanying detailed plans.
Experts will work on task estimates which combine to form the plan, with key milestones and delivery dates sometimes occurring later than originally envisaged. The transformation leadership team should challenge estimates to satisfy everyone that the correct approaches are being taken and the right planning assumptions have been made – this process should drive and push the transformation team to plan as comprehensively and efficiently as possible. Additionally, the experts should be encouraged to plan collaboratively and challenge each other – testing assumptions and boundaries often generates additional opportunity and highlights risks.
Whilst good experts will plan contingency time into their activities, and the contingency from all the experts added together can turn out to appear excessive, it is important to understand the thinking which underpins their assumptions – cuts in contingency on the basis that ‘it cannot possibly take that long’ frequently look injudicious later. Remember, the experts should know more about the detailed activities than the leadership of a transformation programme and should therefore be best placed to produce estimates and justify them.
Solutions: every transformation applies expertise in affected subject matter areas. Experts become such by spending their lives steeped in a discipline and are vital to deciding how to best solve problems. Harnessing the input of many experts to arrive at a cohesive, effective end-to-end solution can be challenging, requiring strong programme leadership. Where experts disagree, mediation is required - either compromise must be reached, or a clear decision must be taken.
It is wise to stagger the release of budget to allow solutions to be contracted for after they have been confirmed as fit for purpose. This approach mitigates the risk that selected solutions might need to be different from those envisaged during the Proposition and Planning phases. Feeding expert solution advice into the earlier phases can also help to mitigate this risk.
Testing: often overlooked, the testing discipline for new products and technologies is critical. In the former, testing to specification and market testing are pivotal. In the technology world, which we will focus on here, embedding ‘test thinking’ as early as the requirements stage is paramount. Too many transformation programmes start to think about testing as they near the end of the Build Phase, only to find that there is insufficient time to prepare and not enough understanding of what should have been built. Building the required tests in parallel with requirements specifications should produce high quality test packs and allow plenty of time to consider changes, complications and crucially, data.
In this section we could also have touched upon technical resourced for development or integration activities, change management experts to manage business / process transition, communications experts, technology support experts and ……amongst others. We’ll touch on all those topics in future blogs.
What happens in cases where experts are overruled or ignored?
Drawing upon our extensive experience of transformation delivery, here are a few tips for working effectively with experts and avoiding some of the common management refrains below:
“The plan is wrong!”
Planning assumptions can always be challenged, but they can also be evidence-based fact. When faced with a solution or estimate you don’t like it’s time to either change what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, or to accept the facts presented. What typically doesn’t work is enforcing cuts to estimates and then obliging people to achieve them – it might create short term impetus but as an enduring approach it will lead to failure as your team burns out, makes mistakes or seeks to avoid blame. The avoidance of planning problems is something we will revisit in more depth in future blogs.
Tip: don’t overrule experts who keep giving you answers you don’t like! Work with them to understand the rationale and assumptions they have used – resist the temptation to squeeze square-shaped estimates into a round plan-shaped hole.
Tip: walk through the critical path of each project in your transformation programme. Whether all the plans join up in total is the acid test of whether you will hit dates. Is there contingency?
“The estimates are pessimistic”
Where estimate ranges are used, it is common that the resulting plan is based upon the ‘most likely’ estimates and sometimes even the most optimistic ones. Rarely do we see people predominately choose the worst-case estimate, even where experts are involved who have been burnt by poor estimation in the past. Unfortunately, it is commonplace for experts to come under fire for being what is perceived as pessimistic.
Tip: make sure each expert or team is transparent about their estimating processes (different teams may use different methods) and understand the real likelihood of the worst-case happening before updating your transformation plan. Do not take an optimistic view across the board and make sure that people aren’t telling you an answer you want to hear, as opposed to expressing their real expectations.
"These people don’t talk the same language"
Experts can find it difficult to communicate in executive terms. An overflow of detail as opposed to a clear, concise explanation of the problem, the solution and the likely effort and costs is a common theme. In this situation it is helpful to hire someone who can do the translation job for you – they will help with the translation and providing the right executive questions to ask to validate the detail.
Tip: if you can’t understand experts who talk in detail, find an interpreter.
"We don’t need perfection. It just needs to be good enough"
Analysis paralysis is a well-understood phenomenon and, in many cases, it requires leadership to apply the pareto principle in order to make progress. Experts in all fields tend to recommend what they perceive to be optimal solutions from their standpoint. [Obviously, this is a blanket statement and not intended to offend all you experts out there who don’t do this]. From the perspective of transformation leadership, time is money and unless there’s a demonstrable upside to perpetuating a solution discussion then it is tempting to cut your losses and get on with what you have.
Where compromises are made, make sure they are logged and explained so that you can pick up any gaps later and propose resolutions. Any adverse impact on the business case or customer experience should be considered and socialised.
Tip: ‘good enough’ can be a subjective judgement call but, as a rule of thumb, if you don’t leak benefits, increase your risk profile, or have to spend a fistful more dollars, then you’re in the ballpark.
Stakeholder experts
If the experts in question are some of your key stakeholders, ignoring them will be to risk their support for your transformation programme. Maintaining strong relationships with stakeholders will help you through circumstances where you might not be able to accommodate their requests or advice.
Tip: being open with expert stakeholders, for example explaining your programme’s constraints, will help them to understand why compromises may be necessary. They may not like it, but they will more readily accept it, particularly if you can demonstrate a pathway to how the optimal solution may be achieved in future.
Balancing expert input with a need to make progress
There is often tension between the opinion of experts and what’s required to make politically acceptable progress. This tension is natural and results as a function of the different standpoints of those involved:
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) often prize detailed information, lengthy periods of analysis, and arriving at optimal, or the best technical, solutions
Experienced transformation programme teams have usually already been bitten at the hands of experts before and tend to like quick, pragmatic decisions and to trust their experience rather than waiting for delayed information which, in their view, often reinforces the decision they knew was going to be taken anyway. They understand that programmes which get bogged down in analysis and specification at the start rarely recover the time during delivery
Sponsors usually require a balance: they need quality solutions to protect both business operations and the transformation business benefits, whereas they also need progress to stick to the transformation road map and protect the cost, risk and scope dynamics of the journey
Of course, there are some solutions that should never be compromised, e.g. those relating to health and safety, but the reality of successful transformation is that effective compromises are the key to keeping a programme on track, notably in the early planning, analysis and design phases.
A strong transformation leadership team will under will be aware of this tension and should help the Sponsor to cut through it, using their expert judgement to understand when enough information is available to arrive at a decision, balancing the need for supplemental against any costs / delays / political fallout that the transformation programme may suffer if a decision is not taken expediently.
Here are some tips for how to create balance:
If everybody knows from the outset that waiting for 100% perfect information will not be possible, they are more likely to support a level of pragmatism even where their private views might be that a decision is suboptimal.
Tip: start as you mean to go on by clearly communicating the need for balance during the Transformation Kick-Off and reinforcing that the leadership team will require quick, thorough analysis to enable progress to plan
It is important so say what you’ll do, and then do what you said. In this case it is important to purposefully take an example early in the programme lifecycle and visibly demonstrate that pragmatic solutions matter to the leadership team and the transformation as a whole.
Tip: create a precedent by selecting a simple, communicable example to solution and make sure that everyone knows why the simplest solution has been selected.
Creating a Design Authority Group (DAG) comprised of Key Process Owners and representatives from the solution teams in your organisation is a great way to keep people’s minds on the outcomes. A suitably empowered DAG (i.e. it is the arbiter and ultimate approver of solution options), with strong leadership, following an agreed set of principles, will create a culture of balance.
Tip: establish the DAG design principles up front and ensure they are signed-off at the highest level. Also, appoint a DAG Chairperson who is widely understood to be balanced and fair in their judgements.
Broad engagement is helpful when producing complex or politically sensitive solutions.
Tip: Get a room – an effective mechanism to arrive at compromise is to design solutions as a team in the same place at the same time. When the majority get behind a pragmatic solution it becomes harder to protect something which is unnecessarily gold-plated.
It is helpful to source experts who have been over the course before and have the time to get into the detail of estimates and solution – either specifically to cover a complex process or technology, or more generally to provide input and challenge across the transformation.
Tip: gather experts with previous solution expertise in the areas you are transforming. Also, have at least one strong generalist acting on your behalf who can take a step back and challenge solutions as they are being produced, ensuring that the right options are considered and approved.
Conclusion
Making the most of expert input is a balancing act and it is important to embrace, understand and maximise the value of experts if your transformation is to be a success. A transformation’s scope and solutions can take on a life of their own without the effective leadership, governance processes and skills required to harness, challenge and optimise expert input.
Starting a programme with Occam’s Razor (which proposes that the simplest solution is usually the best) as a visibly mandated core principle will create the right framework within which experts can add value. Although transformations are a complex web of interconnected moving parts and personalities, it is useful to come back to the simplest answer and then look for justification for why something needs to be more complicated.
Contact Claverton
To talk to us about your transformation needs please visit our website (www.clavertonconsulting.co.uk) or email us at info@clavertonconsulting.co.uk
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