These change management lessons will help your project succeed:
- Appoint a dedicated project leader who focuses solely on managing the change process. Build a team of willing, experienced collaborators who communicate well and wield influence. Foster open discussion of perspectives, alternatives, and shared accountability
- Tackle the most difficult changes early when team energy and budget availability are highest. Reserve resources for high-risk or unforeseen challenges, and build buffer time for critical dependencies.
- Identify the primary constraint by mapping current processes, responsibilities, and time requirements. Look for bottlenecks where work accumulates – often between process steps. The primary constraint is located where productivity is most inhibited creating significant work-in-process delays. Assess its root cause and design your remedy to remove the constraint or maximize its productivity, keeping in mind that secondary constraints may exist, or appear when resolving the primary.
- Maximize agility by anticipating necessary adaptations. Minimize actions or steps that depend solely on the prior step’s successful completion. Replace these with parallel alternative paths where possible, or develop contingency plans to maintain momentum when obstacles arise.
- Establish clear decision points, ‘go/no go’ milestones, based on irreversible actions or significant investments. Before full implementation, stress-test preceding steps to identify potential weaknesses in the remedy that may cause them to fail when activity is at its highest.
How might these lessons help your change initiative succeed?