The CITI Change Diamond® model was developed to structure the different facets of projects and change, linking value to costs, strategy with operations , and delivery to adoption, so that the investment of effort, time and money is channeled into the realisation of benefits not producing outputs – and thus focused on delivering effective and valued change.

The ‘change’ lifecycle in the CITI Change Diamond® is separated into three stages:

1. The first stage is to make the change wanted – this is the fundamental step of engaging stakeholders, establishing the value and aligning the outcomes with the values and needs of the business. From this come the benefits and business cases, the enterprise portfolio and the translation of the deliberate strategy to the emergent or delivered strategy.
2. The second stage is to make the change happen. Though much of the cost arises in the delivery side of the diamond, much of the really important work in structuring the organisation to achieve the benefits is done during this step. For many IT-intensive organisations, the management focus and urgency of making the delivery overwhelms the attention needed by the change process leading to its neglect – which is the cause of real difficulties later in converting the project deliverables into valued outcomes. The change diamond draws attention to change governance concerns that are often overlooked. Experience shows that by giving the change agenda primacy during this stage; reversing the common approach of defining the project and its strategy from an analysis of deliverables, tasks and resources and instead using the temporal and logical needs of the change to shape the way the project is planned and executed yields far better results.
3. The third stage, and the one least well addressed by many change processes, is making the change stick. Though this is where the value of the investment is returned, it commonly receives the least senior management attention. Making it stick means passing the baton on from informed teams heavily involved in delivering the change – whether as members of the project or as part of the change agency – to business-as-usual individuals with considerably less participation to date. ‘Tacking on’ benefits realisation to the end of project delivery is an unsafe and uncertain process.

The change diamond illustrates the linkages that can and should be established, and the impact on the flow of governance of the delivery and adoption processes of focusing on realising the value of project investment.

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Stopping projects early whitepaper

By Louise Worsley

Project culling is an essential part of the portfolio management process. The challenge is to ensure it is systematically and beneficially applied. Recent work by CITI has focused on the need for a project ‘culling’ process which maintains the linkage to the normal portfolio decision-making processes while taking into account the ‘termination risks’, i.e. the risks associated with stopping the project and realising the benefits from stopping the project.

Stopping projects early poorly is a ‘double whammy’ hit on portfolio performance. Not only are the planned project benefits lost or reduced, but cost savings anticipated from the termination are not realised. In a recent analysis of a three large portfolios which had undergone a ‘torrid’ cut-back exercise, we found that over 30% of curtailed project activities were continuing under the portfolio radar. In these cases the project office was reporting the projects as finished while effort, directly trackable back to the project, was still being applied in the organisation.

In deciding which projects to cull, we must therefore also consider whether we can be successful in turning off the effort and expenditure being applied to the project. If the focus of the culling is on reduction in costs; then can CAPEX costs really be avoided? If the focus is on release of resources; then how quickly and effectively will these resources really be redeployed?

To view the full Stopping projects early whitepaper, please supply your email address (to prove you are human!):

Further reading

We also discuss Stopping projects early here:
http://www.citi.co.uk/2009-spring-bulletin/

Your thoughts?

What are your thoughts – do you agree with our approach on stopping projects early, or do the symptoms sound like the ones you are experiencing in your organisation? We would love to hear from you either by adding a comment at the bottom of the page or by emailing one of our consultants at consultants@citi.co.uk – or call +44(0)1908 283610

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