Be different than the herd: Make renewal competency your competitive advantage

Part 27

What comes into your mind as you read the word projects? Do you think of technical aspects of project planning like programme evaluation review technique (PERT) charts and bar charts and resource needs? If so, then you thought about the easy stuff. Most of us have been involved with projects for most of our careers. We have served as members of project teams, project leaders, decision makers and now coaches of business renewal efforts. And over the years we have come to realize that successful business projects have three major characteristics: competent technical management, organisational savvy and awareness of behavioural issues. Let us go through them briefly.

Technical management 
Surprisingly, many small and large projects go wrong. The question is: why do they go wrong? Most of the answer has little to do with the project size or degree of complexity but a lot to do with poor project planning and control. Actually, there is nothing more important to the success of a project than making ‘good’ informed decisions. This technical skill is certainly crucial, yet few managers have had formal training in decision-making and project management. 

Organisational savvy 
There is no doubt that renewal can (and will) upset the organisational apple cart. Make a list of the stakeholders in the renewal project and plot them along two axes: organisational power and level of support for the renewal. A stakeholder is anyone who can affect or is affected by the renewal projects. As you will discover, workers, families, suppliers, community, customers and competitors are all stakeholders. And there will be more. 
Think of all of your renewal stakeholders and see if you know where they fit. As you consider your stakeholders, consider the following: (1) Who will lose power and resources as part of the renewal? (2) Who will gain power and resources as part of the renewal? (3) Who are the opinion leaders the workforce will turn to for guidance? (4) All projects have to deal with three major trade-offs: time, budget and scope. Is there organizational alignment as to which of these three is most important for the renewal effort?
As you proceed with the renewal make sure that you have a communication plan and a strategy for dealing with the concerns of all of your stakeholders. 
Remember, as far as the renewal is concerned, your stakeholders fall into four types. 
(1) Powerful stakeholders opposed to renewal 
(2) Powerful stakeholders in support of renewal 
(3) Weak stakeholders opposed to renewal 
(4) Weak stakeholders in support of renewal 
Handle them carefully. Each segment needs to be handled separately with business acumen and patience. 

Behavioural issues 
Company after company freely admits to us that projects are often late or over budget or completed with reduced scope or all three! If you work with project managers during a project review, you will see that the issues are not technical, they are behavioural.
How do you get around with such issue? Four suggestions can be given. 
1. You will need a full-time project manager for most renewal projects. Renewal is not a matter of tinkering around the edges; more often than not, you will be making significant changes to your business and you can’t afford to have this managed on a part-time, ad hoc basis. 
2. Plan the renewal implementation in enough detail so that you can track it on a week-to-week basis. Unfortunately, project plans are often looked upon as ‘necessary evils’ that can be ignored after they have been presented to the senior management. However, if done right, your project plan will become the basis for communications as the organisation does the work of renewal. 
3. Provide adequate resources for the renewal effort. Now is not the time to try to starve the organisation into prosperity. Also, be realistic about the workload of the people assigned to the project. More often than not, we pile more work onto our best people without ever creating a ‘to stop doing’ list for them. Now is the perfect time to create that list. 
4. Set explicit and appropriate deadlines. Furthermore, hold individuals accountable for meeting those deadlines. We wish we didn’t have to state the obvious but all too often deadlines are viewed as movable suggestions rather than strategically important milestones. 
Remember that project managers are constantly juggling constraints of time, budget and scope. What deadlines have you set for renewal and are they hard and fast? Can the deadlines move up or back if circumstances change? How much money have you allocated for renewal? Will you still fund the future of the business if times get tough? Finally, can you adjust the scope of your renewal effort or is it ‘all or nothing’? 
Keep in mind the reality of project life. If one constraint changes, something else will have to change as well. For example, cutting the budget will affect timing or scope. With that in mind, make it clear to the organisation which of the three constraints is ‘sacred’. They will then know where they have room to manoeuvre.

Seven factors
What separates the great intention underlying renewal project plans from great execution? There are seven factors: commitment, conflict, consequences, measures, resistance, resources and responsibility. Let us briefly go through them.
Commitment: 
Who must be intellectually and emotionally on board for renewal to succeed? Go back to the stakeholder matrix and consider the powerful stakeholders who are not in agreement with renewal. How could they scuttle the effort and what can you do to ‘move them to the right’? Don’t confuse commitment with compliance. You need absolute commitment from some stakeholders and simple compliance from others. 
Conflict: 
Conflict is healthy if it raises issues that have to be discussed and exposes trade-offs that should be made. Although it sounds nice, ‘win-win’ seldom exists in the real world. Normally the best you can hope for is a ‘big win/little win’, with one party realizing more of the benefit than the other.
Consequences: 
There will be organisational and personal consequences arising from renewal success or failure. Be clear about this early on and help stakeholders know how they might be affected. Education is your best course of action. 
Measures: 
What financial measures will signal success or troubles? What customer measures will signal acceptance or rejection by the marketplace? What internal/operational measures can be used to track the effectiveness and efficiency of your efforts? And, finally, how will you measure (and capture) the learning that is taking place so that you can correct your course if needed? 
Resistance: 
Most people do not resist change - they resist ‘being changed’. As you embark on your journey the workforce will want to know the why behind renewal more than anything else. And until they really understand the why, you should expect resistance. You would resist too if you were in their shoes. Put it this way, if you were told to walk into a darkened room, would you move slowly or stride boldly into the room? You’d move slowly until someone turned the lights on. Explaining the why behind renewal is how you turn the organisational lights on. 
Resources: 
What tangible and intangible resources are needed? Do you have the needed skills within the company or are you trying to wing it with your existing team? Depending on the strategy that you have chosen for renewal you may find that you need significant changes in your knowledge-based resources as well as your physical resources.
Responsibility:
Now is the time to be as specific as possible regarding roles and responsibilities for the entire team. If everyone is deemed answerable for the success of the renewal effort, then no one will feel accountable on a personal level.
The odds of trouble-free renewal are not very great. You can minimize the problems by (1) Staying focused and be aware of conflicting priorities, (2) keeping intention and execution aligned, (3) measuring progress and taking early corrective action and (4) involving all stakeholders.
(Lionel Wijesiri is a retired corporate director counting three decades of senior management experience. He is now an independent consultant and a freelance journalist. He may be contacted on [email protected])