Different types of launches in Change Management

It’s Launch Month, where I focus on all things go live and launch in Change Management. But did you know, not all project launches are the same? There are so many different ways to launch and if you start with your project early enough or can influence them to take a different approach, it can totally change the success trajectory of your change.

We’re going to cover 3 different approaches to project launches and I’ll share some high level pros and cons for each. 

Launch Type #1: Big Bang

This is the most common and popular type of project launch. A big bang launch means everyone and everything goes live with the new thing (system, operating model, policy, culture, site move etc) at the same time. Projects, business, and clients tend to love this kind of launch, but do be wary of the watchouts.

Pros: 

• It’s easier and cleaner to have one deadline and one launch date
• It might be linked to external costs or timing, like vendor licensing, lease ends or new industry regulations
• You can work off one timeline and communications plan
• You can phase the project and change activities to start and end waterfall-style
• No one feels left behind or forgotten (awwww, like Lilo & Stitch)
• It can be easier to manage project resources
• It’s faster to launch in one hit

Cons:

• It’s risky to put all your eggs in one deadline basket, especially if you’re not ready or there’s been no pilot to test it out
• It doesn’t account for seasonality and peaks in different teams or business areas
• You might struggle to have the capacity to get all the work done everywhere at once, especially if you’re a national or global company, thereby needing to fund additional resources to help with training and go live across multiple sites
• It’s easy for people to fall through the cracks
• You can’t learn from previous rollouts
• You risk business continuity of operations and service in a major way if something goes wrong
• It can actually take longer to plan and prepare because the scope and scale is bigger
• It can feel jarring to customers, clients and community

Launch Type #2: Phased

A phased project launch is where you go live with a department or a team or a functional role or a location at a time then move onto the next group. For example, you might start a system rollout to the Sales Team and launch and embed that, then launch to the Marketing Team. Or you might do an operating model change in waves starting at the top leadership level and cascading every few weeks or months down.

Pros:

• It can be faster to plan and prepare
• You can rinse and repeat
• You’re working with a smaller group or batch of people, reducing risk if something goes wrong
• You can tailor it specifically to that group’s needs, seasonality, culture, ways of working etc
• It can take the pressure off the project team and you can do a lot with a leaner team over a longer time period
• You’re less likely to miss or forget people
• You can continuously learn from each new group that you launch
• It can help business continuity and service by changing slower for your customers, clients or community

Cons:

• It takes longer to roll out
• You might need to plan the next group while you’re launching and embedding to the group before
• You might not have the time to embed a group that’s slower to adopt because the next group is scheduled
• It might not work for end-to-end business processes and you might not be able to switch on a section at a time without lots of manual workarounds and effort anyway
• There might be duplicate costs i.e. running two systems parallel live for several months, paying for two site leases, etc
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Launch Type #3: MVP

The last launch type is MVP. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product and in a nutshell it’s the smallest and simplest component you can launch that still satisfies the customer/business need and adds value. If your company or client are working agile, they might do MVPs on a regular basis such as monthly or quarterly.

Pros:

• As less is being launched at once, it can be faster to plan and prepare
• It’s less change for a stakeholder to adopt at one time
• You can test and learn from MVP to MVP
• You can build on the information, knowledge, skills and practice of previous MVPs
• You might be able to repeatedly launch with a smaller lean team
• You can make comms and training more self-serve and build a culture of learning ownership and continuous improvement
• The product keeps improving over time - a better solution means a better experience, adoption and value added

Cons:

• It can cause change fatigue in the business as they feel they are constantly being given new tools/features
• It goes over an extended period of time
• Each MVP might require you to complete the end-to-end change process in a condensed timeline i.e. mapping new impacts every month
• Not every organisation has set up their agile ways of working effectively or consistently, impacting rollout success
• It can feel like overload to customers, clients and community if they’re constantly being communicated with or their experience is shifting regularly
• It can take more support even if you rinse and repeat approaches, resources and materials

I love launching in both my Change Management work and my business, and in fact the way I built my Leading Successful Change program was through a launch process. I attended Jeff Walker’s free Launch Masterclass and learnt the secrets to launching, many of which I now use not just in my own business launches but also in my Change Management consulting. I’m a big believer that anything that’s happening in the public consumer space can totally be mirrored for our internal change campaigns and launches. Jeff’s free masterclass only comes around once a year and is on RIGHT NOW.

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Lata xx

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