How One Company Successfully Moved From Setting a Vision to Implementing that Vision
In a past article about one of my client engagements, Look at Change Positively, I shared how a client changed their approach to engaging employees in change by taking a future – positive outlook – approach to thinking about change. I have successfully worked with a number of clients to look at change this way and wanted to share one other story about how a client implemented their vision.
This is a 3 part article:
- Part one of this article will cover the background, who was involved and the start of the session.
- Part two will cover the discussions during the session.
- Part three will focus on what the company will do moving forward.
Background
This client is a services organization of 1,500+ people. The leadership team wanted to improve how projects were selected and prioritized, and how effectively they managed those selected projects to completion. Their vision, effectively, was to implement strategy that is set each year and keep the company moving in the right direction by enabling for the right projects to be launched at the right time. It should be noted that nearly every year, for the last 4 years, the company executives have been talking about how to implement their strategy more effectively. Each year the strategic plan has carried over many initiatives from the previous year along with adding new initiatives. The company was beginning to feel the impact of not choosing the right initiatives through reduced revenues, increased expenses, upset customers, and poorly run projects.
I worked with a few members of the leadership team to evaluate projects completed within the last 3 years. What we found (not all the data is shared here) was:
- Of the 28 projects completed over the last 3 years, only 10 of them were directly aligned to the corporate strategy (36%).
- The balance were a combination of pet projects, projects that were not aligned to strategy and projects that were launched to play “catch up” with what competitors were doing (also considered, by a number of the executives, as “not smart” projects.)
- Often key resources were unavailable for essential projects because they were tied up on other projects.
Who was Involved
50 leaders were invited to the session. The group was divided into 5 groups of 10. Each table of 10 had a mix of leaders from different departments to enable for cross-department collaboration. Each of the leaders invited have been involved in a number of major initiatives over the last 3 – 5 years and each required a number of projects as part of their business. The initiatives they were involved in were not solely the strategic projects implemented (the 10 of 28 that were aligned to strategy) but also the projects that never should have been launched.
The Start of the Session
At the start of the session we posed the following questions to the group to consider:
- Of the 18 projects completed that were not aligned to corporate strategy, how many of them are considered successful and in what ways are they successful?
(We shared the costs associated with those projects and the ROI of them.) - What projects did not move forward because these 18 projects were pushed forward instead?
Then, we proposed the following business issues to the group that would be solved over the next couple of days:
- What selection criteria should be used, and how should projects be prioritized, in order to ensure the right projects are done at the right time?
- How would we ensure that selection criteria is fair and consistent?
- How do we ensure we have the right resources for projects and that they are available at the right time?
Next up – Part 2: Discussions during the session
