Subject :CRM Program Governance and Executive Sponsorship – Part Deux (2)
The traditional view of organizations, particularly within academic literature, has been that they are places of great rationality, where matters are discussed openly, impartially and objectively, and decisions are made in a similar manner. This was also true for organizational change. The process of change has been viewed as a highly rational, logical and systematic process. Executives leading change initiatives also adopted a highly logical and rational approach. This manifested itself in many ways, ranging from the justification and rationale for the change through to the process by which the change was managed. The other main lever adopted was the use of formal power to drive the change through, which meant that all parties 'fell in line' most of the time.
A number of developments have led to this rather simplistic model of both organizations and change being radically rethought. As organizations have become larger, and the complexities exponentially increased, the sole use of formal power to drive changes through has not worked. A single power source in the new matrix organizations was not enough. Second, the articulated rationale and logic for change was not acceptable to many of the stakeholders who saw things rather differently. Third, change programmes had an abysmal success rate, with over 70 per cent of programmes not living up to expectations or being cancelled prematurely. Many academics working in the field also developed new thinking and ideas to capture these new, more sophisticated models, based on a broader understanding of 'organizational behaviour'. Their thinking evolved to see organizations from a range of viewpoints: cognitive, cultural and political. Writers invented wonderful phrases to articulate this more diverse approach to organizations, change and the issues, including terms such as 'bounded rationality, pluralistic competition, muddling through, co-optation, resource dependency, garbage can decision processes and loose couplings'. There are couple of items that needs to be looked at and pave way for the Paradigm shift from traditional organizational objective to new objectives in the CRM era.
Objectives and measures
The new objectives (both operational and transformation-related) are developed and cascaded through the same design process. It is important that these objectives and measures reflect the organizational and project dependencies required for success. Too often projects adopt standard or 'best practice' measures which are inappropriate and which work against cooperation and enterprise success. For example call centres may still be focused on elapsed call-time reduction, when the objectives have changed to encourage the call centre to move to an active role in customer development, through achieving retention, cross-sell and up-sell objectives. Poorly formed measures can easily work against change objectives. Strategic or balanced scorecards can be developed for regular measurement and management of change, not only identifying revenue and profit success, but also providing a hierarchy of success criteria that can be used to identify and control business pipelines and customer management activities.
The overall programme and each subsidiary project require a risk management plan, with prioritization of risks by probability and potential impact. The risk management plan must be active, focused on identifying and mitigating selected risks. These plans are developed in the traditional manner, but with special focus on the external and internal dependencies of ROI achievement for each project and across the programme as a whole.
A traditional project office can provide the supporting and administrative role required to release substantial productive time for the programme manager and boards. There are well-developed models for good practice of traditional project office operations. Programme management is more complex than the management of a single project, requiring the project office to manage multiple projects and their interdependencies concurrently.
When a new application suite is purchased, or applications are integrated to create parts of the new business process, there can be a desire to over-customize applications to fit existing operations. It is important to identify and close only the essential modification 'gap' in the first stages of deployment, allowing more rapid rollout and early achievement of ROI from breadth of implementation deployment. Once the 'new world' processes and application set have been introduced and experienced, it is far easier to identify the essential changes required for business success in this world. This ensures that focus remains on the development of change for future value, rather than for compromise to existing norms.
This is a more significant part of most projects and programmes than is normally allowed for. It requires the programme team and the stakeholders to act together in an integrated plan, releasing previous costs through commitments to implement timely migration and delivering on identified dependencies to ensure ROI. Having achieved isolated project steps, often delivering their own (limited) ROI, it is often more effective to replicate or integrate business operations to achieve much more substantial ROI, than to embark on the implementation of another separate project step. This would normally have been identified in the prioritization process, but can be revalidated as the measures of success become apparent.
The thoughts expressed in the last 2 of my blog article are just glimpse what it takes to make CRM Programme a success with effective Programme Governance and Change Management. I welcome the champions to explore much more on this subject and share your views to our community
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