A Proven Response to IT programme failures

It is almost unbelievable that investigations have been carried out time after time over many years into the causes of major IT programme failures, and the lessons are always claimed to have been learned, and yet the same failures are repeated again and again in ever more dramatic style and damaging impact. The result has been a toxic mixture of damaging delay, unnecessary cost, and complete frustration by all concerned.

My considerable experience in this area tells me that this need not be so. Whilst many best practices are well understood by the professionals, blatant deviations from best practice are often caused by enthusiastic business or government leaders with the best of intentions, but who are nevertheless complete amateurs in the IT enabled business change arena, thereby introducing vastly increased risk of degradation or failure.

The tragedy is that these problems have been with us for decades and yet they recur time and time again as though those lessons from the past mean nothing. The underlying truth is that the critical importance of those lessons was not recognised or fully understood by those at the top in business and government who so often apply huge pressures to achieve unrealistic and impractical business change objectives.

It is not just a good hard look at the change management fundamentals that is required to address this problem; There also needs to be a strong focus on how those with responsibility for business leadership, who are not specialists in this area, need to raise their game in order to become more intelligent users and better informed investors in, and drivers of, IT enabled business change.

However, in our traditional power structure and culture, there has understandably been a great reluctance by many people in top business and Public Sector positions to become more involved in matters such as IT that might take them outside their established comfort zone. This reluctance has been a major impediment to being able to deal effectively with many change management weaknesses and their serious financial consequences.

The fact is that there is not a need to teach board members more about IT. Rather it is about generating a better understanding of their own business and its threats and opportunities in the new IT context, and about the critical success issues in relation to dealing effectively with those threats and opportunities. Unfortunately today’s typical Change Management Steering Committee - or whatever it is known as - does little to encourage or facilitate the raised awareness of critical success issues that is now needed at this level.

A more appropriate board level forum for our age - a Process Change Management Board or Committee - provides a means for board members to become more intimately involved contributors to the IT enabled business change process. Such involvement and exposure to areas that have traditionally been outside their sphere of competence then become an educative process that quickly generates more perceptive and better informed direction of the business change process.

A natural consequence of this situation is a decision making process that takes account of IT constraints and business opportunities and risks in equal measure, thereby avoiding many of today’s poorly informed business or political gambles with ultimate success. Accountability for success or failure then lies clearly at the door of the members of the Process Change Management Board, which in Public Sector terms might well include the Government Minister responsible for the activity being addressed.

The considerable benefits that flow from setting up a Process Change Management Board with an appropriate constitution and agenda, appear very quickly and grow exponentially. This is not however by any means the end of the story. As this board level forum matures it places more critical demands on those lower down within the organisation through more perceptive questioning, better informed appraisal of performance and a growing demand for new business intelligence for forward e-business planning.

These demands from the top naturally lead to further improvements in the change management process throughout the organisation, and to more effective collaboration across cultural divides and clearer business accountability for targeted results. This could be considered as a truly virtuous cycle that starts where it should - at the very top.

The introduction and way of working of a typical Process Change Management Board, and many of the changes that can flow from it, are discussed at length in The Drowning Director written by Geoff Codd. The UNITY change management framework discussed in The Drowning Director is the product of Geoff’s vast experience over several decades in bringing about change in both the Private and Public Sectors.

Brief comment on some of the background and business challenges involved in making the transition to this new change management regime can be found using the page links above, as can the background to the author.

The Drowning Director is published in hardback by Pen Press Publishers Ltd. 25 Eastern Place,
Brighton, East Sussex, BN2 1GJ, UK.          ISBN 978-1-906206-38-3          UK £25.00
and is available from www.amazon.co.uk, www.waterstones.co.uk and via all good bookshops.