Where's My Magic Wand?

I always get an interesting mixed bag of delegates to the Prosci CMP certification programs that I facilitate for and Change . Part of the fun of the three days is “shuffling the deck” for the various break-outs so that, by the end of the three days, everyone has worked or exchanged ideas with everyone else. I try particularly to separate people from the same organisation when possible so that no one corporate culture or viewpoint can dominate in a small group. But, I digress.

One of the delegates on this week’s group wanted to discuss her change project with me as she had some very serious worries about it, having reached the end of the second day of the program. In brief, she works for a solution provider who has won the tender to replace a legacy CRM system in a family-owned business that now has around 1000 employees in seven countries. Her company seemed to realise that they were missing something and perhaps it would be good to have a change manager on the project; I guess they’d done some Googling and spotted the gap.

My first question to her was, “how many people will you have working with you on change management?”. The answer was that there was no-one from her company and she wasn’t aware of any in the client company. Added to that, the two founders, brothers who see themselves as the primary sponsors because they want to modernise the company, were busy with other things so they would find it very difficult to spend time doing the ABCs of sponsorship. Clearly, the delegate was starting to think critically about her challenges now that she had a grounding in the Prosci 3-Phase process.

We had some interesting discussions about the sponsorship coalition, the change agent network that would be needed, and explored some ideas for getting people from the client company seconded to create a change management team as they would understand the internal workings, relationships and politics of the organisation. We also explored ways of ensuring that the founders did get involved with the change, but also discussed the possibility of finding another board member who could become the de facto primary sponsor with the public support of the founders.

But that didn’t mean that the founders could ignore the change and waltz in at the end. I have a simple definition of “sponsor”, and it is this: anyone who can put their hand up and say “my people are changing” is a sponsor, so the founders would still have to behave as sponsors. That means that they would still have to exhibit the ABCs of sponsorship, but not necessarily put quite as much effort into being ‘Active and Visible’ as they would if they were the primary sponsor. They would still be expected to Communicate as well as supporting, if not building, that Coalition of sponsorship.

Bottom line? The external solution provider (and the delegate) was potentially being set up to fail as the change management effort had been underestimated and resourcing was too low for a change of that nature. After our discussion, she completed her course presentation which focussed on the weaknesses shown up by her PCT assessment (strong on project management, but weak in the three other areas) and leveraged the 4Ps as it stressed the dependency of success on people doing things differently. Her conclusion was very clear, and her “ask” included the need for adequate change management resourcing.

We also discussed the idea of making it a hybrid implementation piloting in one country, then reviewing, adapting actions, and then moving forward but reviewing and adapting as needed. And there might have been some cultural challenges too, which would have to be factored into the planning.