Implement Business Change - Leverage Your Efforts to Deliver Practical Impact

"Give me a place to stand," said Aristotle, "and I will move the world." His subject was levers, and how they enable people to move massive objects by applying force in the right way. It is possible to apply this same idea of leverage to any business change project, regardless of whether you are introducing new technology, training people in new skills, or implementing a new corporate strategy. Once you embark on a change, you can very quickly be overwhelmed by the range of things you need to do. It's easy to deliver many, many things, believe you are making progress - but find at the end that you have made little difference and very little has changed.

So what can you do to direct your effort, increase your impact and know that you are making a genuine difference?

First, be clear about the end-game of your change -- do not be distracted by intermediate milestones or quick wins. If, for example, your goal is to cut customer complaint handling time by 50%, then delivering a change education program for customer service agents may not be the thing to get you there -- and in fact, may serve only to distract you and your people from your end goal.

Second, identify the one, two or (at most) three things that most affect the end goal. For example, the single biggest factor affecting speed of complaint handling may be that your spares policy has a built-in 3-day lead time, so you choose this factor to address first. Having chosen it, subject it to the same thinking again, so that you can determine which two or three elements affect it. In our example, you might find that because the spares policy applies to all parts, it has undue impact on the smaller, high volume parts that affect most customers.

Now review your current change plans and activities - if you are doing anything that is not essential to fix these factors, STOP IT RIGHT NOW. It is diverting effort to things that are less important.

Good. So now you know the primary places to which you need to pay attention, and you have freed yourselves from doing lower value activity. What next? The biggest risk here is that although you have selected a specific set of factors and their causes upon which to concentrate, it is very easy to be seduced by the desire to fix everything about them - and get lost again.

So how do you avoid being caught in the undergrowth of process and work flow details and variations that any any change project can uncover? A good way in is to find the points in the work flow where information becomes visible -- where information is displayed for others to see, or where a task is handed over to someone else. Work backwards from the end to identify the three or four of these "pivot points" where things have to be right for the work flow to deliver the business goal.

Set the standards -- the quality, if you like -- that need to apply at each of these pivot points to meet your goal. So, for example, when you look at your new spares process, you realize that any mistake in the specification of a spare will delay the process badly, so you create standards for the quality of the information used by the spares team, thus reducing the chance of such a mistake. Of course, there is more to making a change stick than simply setting and communicating standards, but that is a different issue. Where you set standards is where you apply your leverage.

Remember that the real trick to leverage is to find the highest impact issues - and to identify the transition points in the work flow that make the biggest difference. So as you look at the change projects in your organization, ask yourself -- do I know where I can get the best leverage, where I can really make a difference?