It was clear that the vision had remained within the senior management team, with little engagement from middle management or from the large group of knowledge workers that made up the staff. This lack of engagement was because of the highly directive style of leadership, that, while powerful in normal operational environments, was proving ineffective in transformational change.

A series of forums were created and participation encouraged – which was grudging and suspicious at first, but when it was accepted that the leadership was in earnest and had changed behaviours, became enthusiastic. By dissolving, and in some special cases creating, both real and imaginary boundaries, of power, process and politics, the company began to benefit from the impact of many minds working on the same problem within a shared vision. Sales leapt in response and the programme – re-invigorated – delivered to its vision.

However, in performing migration of customer data to the new system, it was felt appropriate to use the Royal Mail’s postcode software to verify addresses and to render them into preferred formats. When the project’s scheduled three months for data migration had elapsed, but with no end in sight, management insisted that validation activities ceased in order that the primary beneficial impact – knowing which customers were on which systems – could be achieved.

However, this hadn’t become clear until the design of the change programme structure. Mapping the vision to the blueprint threw up an amazing volume and variety of operational change within the stores. It was suspected that this would prove overwhelming. Further modelling showed detailed mapping of hot-spots (areas that would be swamped by change). The hot-spots tended to occur where several initiatives were delivering numerous changes into an area simultaneously, some of which would be national changes but others local to the specific stores or regions. The picture was ugly and complex.

Prioritisation was the first solution: identifying what really needed to happen in which sequence. This was followed by a series of simple procedures and protocols that protected the vulnerable workers in hot¬-spots from change fatigue. The important part was to understand the implications of this protection across all the initiatives on their rate of progress and the related organisational change.

Almost counter-intuitively, the effect of regulating change in the hot-spots was a rapid acceleration in the overall rate of change across the organisation. The primary reason for this was that change fatigue wasn’t encountered. Additionally, the more regulated the change that was introduced, the greater the rate of adoption became.

Initial research into the cause of the problem was focused on requirements management and stability (a common cause of slippage and delivery failure in many organisations). However, this demonstrated that this client was definitely no worse and possibly rather better than many. Deeper research revealed a corporate policy of planning the utilisation of the delivery community at 115% (the underpinning assumption being that, for the higher value work, it would be worth paying the premium cost of overtime to achieve delivery). The consequence was that at this, unattainable, level of loading the planned portfolio was slipping because the organisation was unable to do anything to improve on normal levels of productivity which rarely exceed 80%. The situation was compounded by the ‘surprise’ arrival of additional initiatives; mandatory and ‘emergency’ projects being the most common. The consequence of these ‘surprises’ was constant portfolio re-prioritisation.

Part of the solution was the implementation of a portfolio management and prioritisation tool (CITI’s portfolio efficient frontier analysis [PEFA] tool) which focused attention on the really strategically important portfolio content. This was combined with a formal policy on resource utilisation and a cap on the size of the portfolio. Within a year the organisation had control of a stable portfolio, reliably achieving strategic aims with the capacity to deal with the ‘curve balls’ that inevitably get thrown into the mix.

Within hours of the start of the review it was obvious that there was an unexpected issue. The credit system that had been introduced was not being used by anyone, anywhere in the division. It was widely regarded as cumbersome and was giving unusable outputs. The staff had quietly and unanimously reverted to the old method, using spreadsheets and emails, and were content with the familiar process.

This finding was a shock to IT and to many business managers, revealing an important aspect of the project processes in place. The project was considered complete when the delivery was implemented by IT. There had been no ‘transfer to operations’ to provide a governance and management overview of the transition from ‘new’ to ‘normal’ and no-one was charged with making sure the new processes became business-as-usual.
The findings, and the lessons learned, were taken to heart. The PMO became an RMO (a results management office) and projects were not considered complete until operational management had integrated the outcomes into their KPIs, and reported on them.

Research was undertaken with the buyers to establish what it was about the system that they saw as unacceptable, and sought for ways to restructure the implementation so that it delivered the benefits claimed.

It became clear that the implementation was regarded by the buyers as debasing their self-worth, as they saw themselves as relationship managers, experts in the ways of the suppliers they dealt with, and as negotiators, people who made deals; not – as they described it – as data entry clerks.

Working closely with HR and the business unit managers, the training and the remuneration packages were redesigned. The value of good MI was emphasised and motivated by performance-related pay being associated with good record keeping (a recognised weakness in the earlier systems) and a re-emphasis on the gaining and utilisation of business intelligence on the suppliers.

Focus on corporate behaviour was strengthened with the buyers becoming a vocal force in the use and deployment of business intelligence to further the ambitions of the retailer.