3 ways to convince stakeholders of the importance of Business Readiness Checks

The Business Readiness Check is an absolutely critical tool in the delivery of successful end-to-end Change Management. In fact, if there’s only one thing I recommended that you did in Change Management, the Business Readiness Check would be it. Because it’s not just data like the Change Impact Assessment. And it’s not just a plan like the Change Roadmap or Change Plan. It’s a process: it’s a path to empowerment. 

I like to say to my Leading Successful Change students that risks and readiness are like two sides of the same coin. So with the Business Readiness Check, we are mitigating risks and issues by measuring readiness, making this a crucial change activity.

But when tensions are high and time is running out before go live, it can be hard to get the airspace and bandwidth from your project team and business stakeholders to commit to doing a readiness check. Here are 3 ways you can convince your stakeholders about the importance of doing Business Readiness Checks. 

1. Hide it in a Training Readiness Check

If you've got training coming up, it's a great chance for you to identify the Business Readiness Check items for go live. You can hide the go live readiness items in the Training Readiness Check. You can say something along the lines of, “Look, we only get one bite of this cherry. It's really important that all of our staff and teams do this training and that we make it as optimal and effective as possible. Why don't we do a readiness check just to make sure that we've ticked all the boxes, crossed all the T's, and dotted all the I's before we run this training. We want to make sure that go live/launch is really successful.” Then you can hide a little surprise - a few of your go live readiness items - into the Training Readiness Check. 

Often what I find is that people love the readiness check after they've done it - after you've given them the experience of it and they've seen how valuable it was and how much got flushed to the surface, they're like, “That was really great!” Then when you've had a quick win with the training one, you could then go, “Do you want me to run something similar for go live?” You can simply take the rest of your Change items and do it for go live. I’ve done this before and used training as an opportunity to create the check for go live so if there's anything that we need to adjust, we've already identified it before we kick off training. What you are really doing is getting them to flush out any risks and issues and gaps for go live, as well as for training. And if you’re really strapped, you could hide Change readiness items in the Project Go / No Go run by the Project Manager but do be careful - it might be too late in the game to adjust anything and may not give the Change items the focus they deserve. So if you can build it in before training, try that first.

2. Sell it with style

Sometimes it’s not what you’re proposing, but how you’re proposing it. Instead of being dogmatic about needing to do a Business Readiness Check, be a little suggestive or playful instead when communicating the need to do it. You can always say, “Let's do an experiment. I want to try something out. I just learned this new approach, a new tool that can help make sure that we are ready.” 

Or if you see that people are struggling, if there's confusion around who's doing what, if there's confusion about whether things are finished, if there's confusion about “Is this going to be successful?” You can go, “I actually know how to do a readiness check. Did you want me to run that process for you?” They’ll say yes or no. Find out what's the pain point right now for the business or for the project and then use the readiness check as the solution to whatever problem they're experiencing or what they're worried or concerned about. And always remember: projects, we love them to pieces, we love them to death, but for whatever reason they are so ambitious and optimistic and unrealistic about how they're tracking so it might be up to you to influence them to see progress for what it is!

3. Go sideways

Business Readiness Checks aren’t just for projects. Any BAU (Business As Usual) leader can use them to showcase how their team is tracking when receiving initiatives. Remember that any of these Change Management templates, tools, techniques, approaches, and processes, can be used from a business perspective to coach the people around you (which is why I get business leaders joining my Leading Successful Change program). You could use a readiness check for your team, then you could take it to your peers or your leader or whoever is cascading these projects down and go, “Hey, I did this thing. This is where we feel we're at. Did you want me to do it for your team/other areas?” You have the opportunity to spread the knowledge and coach sideways and up, helping your peers as well who are probably struggling with really similar things to you. With enough broad evidence of readiness, you could then showcase that up the project line or portfolio line or managerial line and “Go, here's where we as a cohort feel that we're at.”

Finally, as one little extra bonus suggestion because we talk about this all the time in Leading Successful Change: when your energy shifts, the energy around you shifts, too. Sometimes simply by doing the Business Readiness Check yourself, on your own, regardless of the involvement of stakeholders! So practice it, test it out, just do it for your team because when you shift your energy, you can create ripple effects around you of change.

Planning out go lives and launches is big business and we can totally apply the same principles when we launch publicly in Marketing as when we launch internally in Change Management. I learned launching and created my Leading Successful Change program from the guy who literally wrote the book: Jeff Walker.

Once a year, Jeff opens up his free Launch Masterclass and it's coming up this week. If you'd like to learn launching from the man himself (and potentially create and launch a course, product, book etc of your own), send me a DM on LinkedIn with the word LAUNCH and I'll let you know when registrations open in a couple of days’ time.

Lata xx

Affiliate Disclaimer: I am a proud affiliate partner of Jeff Walker and Product Launch Formula and I may receive a commission, at no additional cost to you, if you decide to join Jeff's paid training program.