Thinking in Threes – Measuring Successful Change

Change.  There, I’ve said it.  But what does it mean and how to we measure successful change?

I admit it isn’t a popular word these days but that’s what everything in business is really about.  If you can’t change or adapt, you will eventually fail.  We can cloak it under Enterprise Performance Management (which I usually do), Business Performance Management or even Corporate Performance Management.  These are currently politically correct titles for trying to get your organization or the people within it, both employee and executives, to change, to focus on something that they previously have not, or get them to do thing they really don’t feel like doing.  There is an actual difference between EPM, BPM, and CPM, but only people who live EPM generally care about those distinctions. 

Change is more than just forcing people to do things differently.  The traditional approach to change management (telling employees what they need to differently and explaining the benefits of these changes and then going the extra mile to tell them how hard change is for everyone – and then expecting them to actually change) doesn’t work.  It takes more than that.  It takes a “paradigm shift” in how we see things like change management, in order to create actual change.  In this blog we’ll question those traditional approaches.

Many times it is overlooked, but there are actually two parts to change.  First, figuring out what that change needs to be and getting the new processes in place.  Second, making that change stick permanently.  We often focus on the first, and usually forget the second.  Yet it is the second part that actually matters.

Approaches to continuous improvement address the first issue, they help you identify processes that need improvement and then (hopefully) guide you towards a better solution.   Then they move on to the next improvement project.  Rarely to they address the natural tendency of people to simply revert back to what they always did.  Over time employees assume old habits and work patterns and the new changes are left behind.  There needs to be something there to make that change stick.

 I really do wish the answer wasn’t technology – everything would be a lot easier that way.  But, that is what makes Enterprise Performance Management so powerful.  It makes change sticky.  Or it can, if you do it correctly – which is a big part of what this blog is and will be about.

For me, change in and of itself, doesn’t represent success or failure.  For me, there is only one real measure of success – a sustainable improvement in performance.  A temporary improvement in performance represents both success and failure – short-term success and long-term failure mitigating the short-term success.  Therefore the effort was nothing but a waste of precious resources.  And these “failed” projects do something more insidious, something very harmful to the organization; they contribute to a culture that says yes to the man when he asks you something because you’re only going to go back to doing what you always did when he leaves.

My suggestion: Think in Threes.  Budgets are generally done in yearly increments, and strategic plans typically span three years.  This relationship has developed intentionally: the first year is easier to predict on a monthly, more granular basis, with each year growing more difficult.  In most industries today, anything beyond three years is pure guesswork.  If it will take you three months to put a new process improvement in place, ask yourself where it will be in nine months, and how can you ensure that it will still be successful.  Bigger changes take longer to accomplish.  Thinking in Threes will force you to measure their success in proportionally greater increments, weighting them more heavily – as they should be.

::: Giannetto

~ by giannetto on March 28, 2008.