I’d like in this post to explain why I believe that, as Programme/Project directors or Projects Portfolio Managers (I’ll use the PMs abbreviation in the rest of the article), we are ideally skilled to become transformation leaders in our companies and organizations.

PMs are used to run projects to launch new products, services and systems, and create unique customer deliverables. Most of these introduce changes in processes, organizations and people behaviors. We know from experience how to structure a complex programme or a portfolio of projects, collect individual project data, analyze it, organize it, clarify and confirm deliverables, timelines and ownership. We’re also able to validate and take commitments for an entire programme or project. We often have to build and effectively communicate simple and powerful messages to management, customers and team members. So, I propose that we make a step forward and evolve from change agents on a specific project to transformation leaders for an entire portfolio of transformation initiatives at organization or company level.

Introduction

You’ve most probably already been engaged in transformation and continuous improvement programmes in your professional or personal life. I have experienced many of these and I’ll mention some as we go along in order to put the talk into perspective.

• Kaizen is a Japanese word referring to a philosophy focusing on continuous improvement. When applied to the workplace, kaizen typically refers to activities that continually improve all functions of a business.
• Continuous Improvement Process (CIP, or CI) is a management process  whereby company processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility.
• Reengineering or Business process reengineering (BPR) is an approach aiming at improvements by increased efficiency and effectiveness of end to end business processes by a full review and rethink of these from A to Z.
• Rebranding and more specifically Corporate Rebranding is the process by which a company is marketed or distributed with a different identity. This may involve radical changes to the logo, name, image, marketing and advertising. It often includes real desire of cultural changes of the company being rebranded.

Current pitfalls and issues experienced

• Kaizen and Continuous improvement approaches: I have always liked these incremental approaches where people doing the job constantly try improve the way things are done. The very name of this blog, DantotsuPM, is about constantly thriving to improve our PM skills. One of the main issues with incremental and continuous improvements is that the better you conduct them, the less visible they are. I mean that when you manage these changes really well: you will have prepared the organization, gradually introduced changes and followed up to ensure they are functioning properly… Your greatest testimony of success is when people think of these changes as natural evolutions rather than revolutions. But how can we get proper management attention and funding for something that seems so natural that it has become « almost » invisible?

• Reengineering: In the 1990s, many authors wrote on this topic. The most famous I can recall (as they were often quoted in the company I worked for at the time) were Michael Hammer and James A. Champy with their famous book « Reengineering the Corporation ». It did cost our company a leg and an arm to try to follow their precepts and reengineer from A to Z our Order to Cash chain of processes and systems with mixed results. On one side, it certainly helped to bring all IT and Business/Process experts together and force the revisiting of all processes in this chain. These processes had been created years ago and a refresh was more than welcome. However, if you calculate the cost per order (say over 5 to 7 years of lifetime of the reengineered solution) of all investments and expenses, you will find that it added a very significant amount to each and every order (over one hundred Euros in some business cases I reviewed). Therefore, one could say that it reduced our price competitiveness (or decreased our margins) on each order for several years. Of course, this is to be tempered by the cost of doing nothing (if the company had not engaged on this massive reengineering programme). And, the success rate of such initiatives remains quite low. So, what is the true Return of Investment of such and undertaking?

• Rebranding: This is also one area I had a chance to actively contribute to. It was a wonderful, motivating and challenging experience. We managed to merge multiple brands in our companies portfolio into a single one. It increased its power and its impact. It clarified the messages and also reduced overall marketing and advertising costs. So, it certainly brought most of the rewards the company was expecting. The one place where I think we could have done better is on the culture behind the brand, especially its meaning and values for the employees and management of the company. We had a great start with 8 core values well articulated that we spent time to explain and discuss with all. However, past the Rebranding initial big push, we did not hammer these values to really make them become part of our DNA. I trust that a few years later, most managers and employees would be challenged to list these 8 core values from memory. An important aspect of transformation programmes is that they take long to bed in.

Some of the key pitfalls I have witnesses with the above examples and others are:

• Nebulous Objectives and Goals: Some Business Process Reengineering initiatives were driven as IT programmes often called Order to Bill, Customer Relationship Management, or Enterprise Resource Planning. The focus was more on the tools than the business processes transformation required. The risk in this situation is that what we are really trying to achieve from a business stand point gets lost in techie world.

• Never ending or unclear timelines and deliverables: humongous programmes, multi years, millions of investments, thousands of man days… While starting from a good idea, the definition of the scope and management of changes often derail. Small is most often beautiful in project management. One clearly defined step at a time is better than engaging in a long trip towards an unclear destination and without clearly defined stops/stages.

• A multitude of small initiatives that are loosely coupled at best, unrelated in most instances. We may have a lot of excellent changes to execute but cannot articulate them into something really meaningful for the company. We run the risk of rapidly loosing focus, support and momentum. Additionally, there is a lack of overall leadership for these to ensure proper attention and progress.

• Loss of focus/business drive and support: The span of attention of key executives is often only minutes as they have to juggle so many things in parallel. If change/transformation programmes do not capture enough of their attention in a short time-frame they will not get their full support. And for any transformation, executive support is critical. The same applies to employees at all levels. If we cannot keep them engaged in our transformation initiatives, we will not be successful.

I will focus in this post on the continuous improvements type of changes and transformations. The Reengineering and Rebranding transformations should already be run as projects or programmes and if you hear about such an undertaking in your company then volunteer to lead or be part of it. It will always be a great learning opportunity.

What can PMs do about continuous improvement?

We can apply our skills and experience to transformation ideas, change/transformation projects and programmes.

• Bring structure: After all, it is a key characteristic of PMs to be organized, structured, paying attention to details… We can apply these very skills with great success to transformation initiatives. We will collect the base data about all on going transformations and change ideas for a given domain, organization or division. At the initiative or idea level, we will structure it like we do for projects. We will identify information gaps and then fill these gaps. We will position/categorize all initiatives into consistent buckets; propose criteria for prioritization of the overall portfolio of ideas together with a simple overall process to manage the portfolio. For example, define what stages an idea would go through before it eventually becomes a project and delivers benefits to the company. These stages could be: unqualified idea, real opportunity, launched initiative/project, draft deliverables, final deliverables. Doesn’t this sound familiar to the ears of PMs?

• Clarify: From experience, I can tell that you will find many transformation/change initiatives and ideas where the ownership is not well defined nor accepted, where people are fuzzy about what the deliverables will be and even fuzzier about when they will be ready. So, very much as we do it for any project, we will spend time ensuring that each initiative in the portfolio of potential transformations is clearly defined, ownership accepted, deliverables understood and target dates agreed by the people who will work on them. Each change idea will be treated as a small project with clear deliverables, ownership and target timing. Also, metrics to measure the impact of the change shall be defined and current performance data gathered. A spreadsheet with the following columns will get you started: Identifier, Category, Priority, Name, Owner, Status, Expected Deliverables, Next Steps, and Target Dates for draft and final deliverables and for the other stages you may have defined to progress the initiative.

• Simplify: Because many ideas appear to be brilliant, justified, attractive… You will inevitably have too many candidate proposals for the resources available to work on them. Additionally, if all were run in parallel, they could generate far more changes than the organization can absorb at once. So, you will attempt to give sense to the portfolio through prioritization and alignment on overall company and organizational objectives. The first pass should really aim at pruning the portfolio of ideas, keeping only juiciest ones. The second pass will look at staging these over time depending on urgency, resources the company can afford to dedicate to these and availability of the best resources. In fact, the last point is often a key driver: There are only so many resources able to lead some of the difficult change initiatives your company may want to undertake. Another area to simplify is the process for getting new ideas into the pipeline and reviewing them in a structured manner. This shall aim at facilitating new suggestions introduction and review.

• Push, action, move, create a momentum: You will need to ensure that all initiatives are progressing per the agreed timelines;  that their owners remain committed; that more people want to join and have their change or transformation ideas added to the portfolio. These are things you are used to do as PMs for your programmes and projects.

• Communicate with clarity. If a PM’s job is often said to be 80% about communications, when you lead a transformation project or portfolio of change initiatives, then, most of your time will be spent on communications. A key difficulty is that you may have over a few dozens items running in parallel and all could be addressing different aspects of the business. Yet, your message shall remain simple and targeted for your audience. As indicated earlier, the categorization of the ideas to structure the portfolio will help. The alignment of your portfolio on corporate or organization strategy will also greatly facilitate communications. For example, if the big themes of your company are Customer Satisfaction, Profitability, and People development; you may want to organize your portfolio of changes around these 3 main themes. It will facilitate communications and appropriation as people will easily relate the changes to a model they are familiar with. Communication shall also highlight the benefits already achieved through completed changes and provide a taste for the ones to come.

• Take the lead personally on some of these initiatives to work on the contents and also to experience the processes you’re deploying. This recommendation was given to me by my boss and I think he hits a very interesting point. It is about eating what you bake, i.e. being users of the approach we’re putting in place. It is also about bringing your personal value add to selected key change/transformation initiatives and being very instrumental in the success of these. You will also want to keep the momentum and give a good pace to the portfolio. Suggestion: Set up a portfolio board that meets regularly and includes all key players. It will encourage contributors to progress their initiatives as agreed, it will provide a forum to review and improve their deliverables, and it will provide visibility and momentum to keep things moving.

Act: take the lead! And benefit from doing so.

Current tough business conditions favor a desire throughout the enterprise to support or at least understand the need for changes. I would be most surprised if no major changes were happening at this very moment in your own environment and organizations. I sincerely hope that this post will have given you the will to consider such changes with a new eye and with the view of a Programme/Project director or Project Portfolio Manager.

You have the skills to become a leader of transformation in your business or organization. Go for it!  Propose a new and structured approach to manage transformation and change initiatives and you run great chances to be listened to.

Additionally, I’m convinced that it is a win-win. Along the journey, you will personally acquire and/or reinforce critical and valued skills. You will then exploit these in many other situations: leadership, change management, prioritization, business alignment, big picture view, communications, networking…