Why the Change Industry Needs a Clean Sheet

Change is constant, exhausting and happening quicker than ever. In business, we are enabled by technology, challenged by competitors, pressured to deliver more by our customers, and expected to offer more to our people.

And sadly, what I’ve seen in the change management industry is an inability to meet these demands. Projects fail. They fail in meeting their objectives, often fail to deliver - or deliver meaning - and the people involved often have little faith in the project and leave with war wounds, demoralised and jaded. To quote a business associate “I’ve never known a happy business analyst”. What a sad state of affairs. I could quote lots of research in the field of failed projects, but just do a quick search and it's all there.

Then there’s the new world and small businesses, where there’s sometimes little thought given to how best to approach a project or how to define what suppliers should do for them.

The desire and pressure to get things done quickly, often leaves re-work, as insight hasn’t been gathered or analysed and the change therefore, hasn’t been defined with a view of actual user needs.

It's often just a lack of the skills required to effectively manage every element of a project, where key people are stretched beyond their skill sets - which is great for personal development, but sometimes we all need a bit of outside perspective and experience to define what a business needs. It is a skill, and it's what business analysts should be able to do.

Alternatively, change just happens organically. To some extent, this can’t be avoided. We can’t plan for every eventuality, and we need to be flexible. But without foresight, design and management of your business’ change, you build in inefficiency, leave much to chance and often fail to measure how your business is doing.

To quote Francis Bacon “Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they are not altered for the better designedly.”

So why aren’t businesses coming to business analysts and project managers for help with the change? I think there are two answers to that:

1. Our industry has an acknowledged competency issue
2. There’s too much confusion about what we do

The term business analyst has become loaded, unclear and taken on way too much. People don’t know what we do, and if they do, they don’t think we’re generally good at it. 

Here are my thoughts on why there is a poor perception of this industry.

1. Change “management” is outmoded

Change is everything – it’s as broad a concept as you can get. Change management however, is not. Change management could be defined as structures of people, with tools and methods of controlling change – generally speaking. However, projects themselves still have massive failure rates, lack satisfaction for the people working on them and generally are not progressive.

The issue here is often a clash between designing of change and delivery of change. It’s often a clash of cultures, for example, the architects seen as lofty, designers seen as wacky creatives, with no grip on the reality of delivery, and the delivery teams and change function seen as controlling and inflexible. If not a creative clash, often it's the clash between "the Business" and "Technology". I've always found this is a strange dualism - isn't everyone in a company "the Business"?

Every team in an organisation should be working towards a common goal. That goal should be communicated, and embedded in that organisation's culture. Change management needs to embrace communication, innovation and creativity. The world is moving too quickly to stay with our current modes.Culture, customer and clarity are often absent in change frameworks

2. Culture, customer and clarity are often absent in change frameworks

I have never - and I mean this - seen any focus on culture on a single project I’ve worked on. There are some good eggs out there that genuinely do focus on the customer and can produce clarity through their deliverables and their socialisation, but they are sadly not in the majority and rarely have the right project culture to support them. To my mind, the key elements needed for a successful project are:

• A culture of willingness - to learn, to work together, to be collaborative and to leave a legacy
• Customer focus – at every stage, and for every project participant, the customer needs should be elicited, designed for, tested against and communicated
• Clarity – of roles and responsibilities, of approach, of deliverables, of success measures, drivers and objectives – and of the desired customer outcome.

At the outset there's often vision, strategy and business objectives defined but this somehow seems to get lost once a project is mobilised. Suddenly outcomes for the customer and the business are lost in jargon, change frameworks, project plans, politics and delivery pains.

3. The industry has lost its competency

Demand has outstripped the ability of the market to deliver quality.

Although there are many people in this industry with admirable skills, subject matter expertise, experience and more – there are still fundamental competency issues in the profession. Even some of the most broadly accepted concepts within project delivery are not understood by those claiming the titles of business analyst, project manager or their ilk. For example, Agile – it’s not new, yet I still see masses of confusion over its definition, its implication and its application. I’ve heard several times “it's Agile with a small a” – that’s just nonsense. Agile is a methodology, a well-defined set of methods in fact – anyone who has to say "it's Agile with a small a" is probably attempting to excuse a poorly defined project approach.

Defining and communicating a method for delivering your change is key to success, be that Agile or otherwise - these methodologies still have a place, when understood.

4. We’ve made ‘change’ too hard to be good at.

It’s as if we’ve tried to make business analysis (specifically), esoteric. We’ve come up with all these different languages for what we do, and you know what – they’re confusing. If it’s really hard to understand the difference between business requirements and functional requirements – then I think the distinction has no place. If it’s too hard for analysts to learn, how on earth can we expect our stakeholders, subject matter experts and delivery partners to understand what we are doing, why we are doing it and to fully respect our role?

To my mind, our key role is communicating. If the methods and the words we use to communicate aren’t understood by us or other project participants - we’ve failed.

5. Change refuses to learn

There is an irony in our inability to genuinely learn from mistakes and build them into future projects and future change within a business. This inability isn’t a physical or systemic issue, it’s an unwillingness borne of culture based on blame, empire building and inflexibility. Often a lack of leadership and a loss of sight of the vision for the organisation, a lack of association with a community have led to individuals fighting for their own little piece of land and defending what they are doing, pointing fingers and looking for blame.

Instead, shouldn’t we take a shared ownership approach to projects?

What can we do about it?

Despite the air of negativity here, I am a positive person. I believe in making things better, and I believe in our industry. But I feel it needs an overhaul, a progressive look at the new, and a new way of working. This is what I think we can do:

1. Develop new talent, with a focus on delivering for people and for customers. With a recognition of the skills and training required to effectively and dynamically deliver change for business. Mentor and lead this new talent to take pride in their work, be excited by the prospect of delivering for customers, listen to them and change Change as we go.
2. Create clarity through avoidance of industry jargon, overly complex frameworks and get back to the nitty-gritty. If the people doing the jobs can’t understand what they are doing, how on earth can their customers, or the suppliers? Define approaches, scopes and deliverables that people understand, and that reflect the goals that the change, the organisation and the people involved, are aiming to achieve.
3. Create projects and businesses that people want to work for. Inspire them through leadership, mentoring, career and personal development. Be cognisant of what people want from the workplace. Involve people in the definition of the workplace culture, giving them the flexibility to grow personally and have lives outside work.
4. Embrace change in change – if something isn’t working - try something new. Change is an evolution. It’s as broad a concept as they come, and a one-size-fits-all methodology just isn’t working. So let’s change, and build change into change. Let's stop being afraid of learning from mistakes. Every project has its own DNA, defined by the company culture and the people involved, so why do we think a stringent change methodology will work every time? It won’t.

These are the foundations I'm building my business This is Milk on, a change management company that loves change.

The full version of this article was originally published at thisismilk.co.uk

_______________________________________________________

Angela Prentner-Smith is founder and Managing Director of This is Milk, a business change and transformation consultancy based in Glasgow and dedicated to making businesses better, simply.