Management misconceptions: “changing the way we work will cause too much distraction”

“Changing the way we work will cause too much distraction to our key personnel.  We can’t afford this right now.”

This excuse for not driving change when change is needed is likely to be heard even more these days than before.  Lou Gerstner, former IBM President & CEO, once said that “you have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.”  Well, if you’ve updated your strategy to be able to thrive in a changing market, or if you’ve realized than certain operational processes must change to become more effective – you’ve gone part of the way towards reaching your objective.

However, being adaptive is about executing the strategy and implementing innovation – not just about realizing that change is needed.  Innovation and change cannot be done to people – it must be done by them.

Change programs can often be implemented in staged, incremental steps, starting with the highest priority changes.  Such plans can take into account the level of pressure faced by key employees on their daily routine. For example, project managers some times tend to estimate the amount of effort required to complete a project by deducting the effort to date from the original effort estimate.  This practice is deficient, as the knowledge and experience gained on the project at the time of status reporting by the project manager may dictate a change in estimates for future project work.  Getting project managers to think about what they’ve learned to date before they communicate their “estimate to complete” is a simple measure that can easily be implemented without major disruption to the work practices that are in place.  Of course the project manager is now required to proactively think about his/her future project effort – but experience shows that the little time required to do this saves significantly more time in the future, in addition to helping avoid future surprises and issues relating to budget overruns and non-delivery of customer commitments.  Surprisingly, even established companies do not always ensure that such simple measures are consistently applied when needed.

Depending on size and complexity, change programs may be defined as special projects and assigned both executive owners and external consultants, some of which may be full-time.  For these programs to succeed, key personnel related to each change must be engaged in its design, communication and implementation.  It is up to the executive owner to minimize the disruption to regular business activities while still achieving the objectives of the program.  As key employees are almost always busy, deferring the changes till “there’s enough time” is generally akin to deciding that it’s not going to happen at all.