The absurdly simple secret of successfully selecting the right Change tools for any project

When you’re about to start working on a project, how do you decide at the beginning what tools to apply for projects of different scale and complexity?

First things first, there's a big difference between scale, complexity and impact. Here’s how I like to define them:

Scale: 

Scale or size is how many people it's going to affect: 

• how many people are impacted
• how many people are involved in the project
• what are the ripple effects perhaps to customers, clients or community? 

Scale is usually the number of people who are going to be impacted. I’ve worked on changes that have impacted over 100,000 people. I’ve worked on big changes that have impacted whole organisations. We're talking 15,000 people. That's scale. And there is inherent complexity because of scale. The more people who are impacted, there's inherent complexity built in because you have to go to more places and it's usually more distributed. There’s usually levels and layers. You might be going across state lines, country borders, all of that. That level of sheer scale adds complexity in and of itself. 

Complexity:

Then you've got complexity: how have we even been operating the way that we've been operating because everything is so convoluted and manual and this way and that way! I’ve worked in businesses or with clients where the reporting lines are one thing, then the work that teams actually do is completely different. And it's this real matrixed operating model in real life, even if it’s clean and clear on paper. You are trying to plan out the impacts of the change based on departments, but actually the organisation is criss-cross. And some people, they're costed over here but they report in over here, and they're located over there but report in here, and things like that. Small organisations I’ve worked with can be more complex than some of Australia’s biggest companies I’ve worked with simply because of the way it was structured. Or it could be the complexity of a business and what they offer. Say for example, you've got a small team of 10 people, but they offer 10 products and they've got to be across all the products and there's a whole customer journey and lifecycle behind each product. That's complexity: in the organisation, the structure, or the offerings or the services. 

Impact:

Then the third thing, which I think people forget is impact. And impact is not necessarily related to scale or complexity. Impact is: how is somebody going to react to this? And sometimes the very smallest changes that people think are going to go through without a hitch are the ones that drive the most resistance and emotion for no reason except that people thought it was going to go off without a hitch. They didn't put much Change Management effort behind it. And so then, instead of letting people know that we're about to upgrade this operating environment over the holidays, they don't let anybody know and for two weeks nobody can do their job and take orders or phone systems shut down because there were technical issues with cutover. The impact is high, even though the change itself was not massive or complex. At least, it shouldn't have been complex. The impact that it actually had was huge. Sometimes it's people's reaction and it's what they read into the lack of communication or the lack of clarity because you thought that something was so simple. And finally, when you've got people who have been there a really long time, that adds to the impact. because the likelihood is that they haven't dealt with a lot of change and they've been doing things the same way for a long time. 

So scale, complexity and impact are three things you can look at.

They're not levers, they're just ways of understanding that things that you think are going to drive where you should put your attention might not be. Often we're trying to manage our resources and manage our capacity based on how much effort something's going to take or how much risk it's going to be. But sometimes the smallest things can have big ramifications. 

So what Change tools do you select?

There's probably a base level of change that I would always do for any change. I would always try to have at least a Change Roadmap or a Plan at least, and at least one Readiness Check. If that's all you ever did, at least you've got those two things. And it doesn't have to be a full Detailed Change Plan of multiple weeks. It could just be a one-page Change Roadmap and a Readiness Check. That could be your minimum standard for every single change. 

Then based on complexity, scale, and potential impact (how people might respond), you could then go, “Okay cool, because people have been here a really long time, they're really wedded to the way things are done now. Let's do vision setting so that we can paint a new vision of the future.” Or, “Because the business is so matrixed, let's do a mapping workshop.” I’ve done that for clients where I’m like, “Here’s how your business actually looks. Did you know that?” And they knew it in their head but they had never seen it visually demonstrated. And so when they see it, they’re like, “Yes, I can understand now why our governance is a little bit iffy.”

That's where you can start to make some decisions. For scale and complexity, you'll probably need many more resources to help cascade the change, and may bring people on earlier and do train-the-trainer. But at a base minimum I would always recommend a Change Roadmap or Plan either/or and a Business Readiness Check because at least then people have the information even if they don't act on it.

Lata xx

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