By Rochelle L. Levy No matter how experienced you are as a project manager, or how amenable your client, the success of your project rests on having a clear vision and strategy. In the second international seminar hosted by CSC’s Project and Program Management Community, three strategy experts turn their attention to two areas that traditionally get short shrift, yet play a vital role in a project’s lifecycle — enterprise transformation planning and information technology strategy.

Making enterprise transformation work

Moderator Dan Sarna, CSC corporate director of delivery assurance, opened the seminar by posing the question: What makes enterprise transformation planning programs a success? And conversely, why do so many fail? In his own experience, Sarna says, the two most important elements at this phase of the lifecycle are being aligned with a true power broker and remembering that this is not about technology — it’s about business.

Irvin Lee, a partner in CSC’s Strategic Services Group and a longtime consultant in industries running the gamut from financial services to entertainment to healthcare, takes a big picture approach. After spending his early years coming up with out-of-the-box ideas, Lee realized that an original idea wasn’t worth anything if you couldn’t implement it.

“Strategy is all about creating results,” says Lee, acknowledging it took 10 years for the technology to catch up with some of his team’s process redesigns. Even then, success was not guaranteed. “I have been involved with a lot of projects where we had a great strategy, a great process and great technology, but we still couldn’t get any business results.”

On numerous projects, Lee has been hired to examine a completed enterprise transformation program and figure out why it did not yield business results. The “missing link,” as Lee calls it, revolves around change of management, which Lee defines as “the transition of an organization from the way it does work in the past to the way it has to work in the future, based on a redesign.” Asking people to change, however, is never easy. Employees may feel like they’re losing control, which can manifest itself in
insecurity and a resistance to adopting a new way of working.

Steve Caulkins, a senior partner with CSC Consulting’s Supply Chain Solutions who specializes in business architecture and process design, agrees that an enterprise transformation may challenge employees’ comfort zones. “No one wants to be exposed for not being successful, not carrying their weight, whatever the case may be,” Caulkins says. Everybody — vendors, partners, employees, even transformation consultants
— has biases and agendas. But communicating clearly with the client, without using industry-specific jargon, can rally everyone around the same goal. If you don’t have the necessary buy-in upfront, says Caulkins, “you just sort of chip away at it every day. It’s critical in a transformation project that ownership successfully transfer over to the client.”

Getting to the right person

Lee concurs with Sarna’s contention that it’s crucial to align yourself with the executive who has green-light power. “Change management comes down to one single human problem we’re trying to address, which is, ‘What’s in it for me?’”

Lee recommends addressing that question at three different organizational levels — executive, middle management and workforce. While those at the executive level must sign off on the project and put their clout behind it, employees at the user level must buy into the new strategy. They, after all, will be the ones using the technology on a day-to-day basis. So they must be open to adopting the changes.

“It’s not the structure; it’s getting the right people,” Lee says. You need to “identify the three to four people in the company who have the political clout to make decisions and pull off the company’s transformation.”

But how do you know who in a company really has the power? “I’ll say, ‘Who else should I go ask about this?’” says Caulkins. If he receives a typical rote response, like “My boss,” he’ll follow up with, “‘Well, who are you going to go ask about it?’ It might be
someone who’s not on the org chart but who has an informed, respected opinion.”

Once you’ve identified those with power, you need to get them onboard as members of your steering committee. Again, be ready to explain what’s in it for them and how this transformation will benefit their career.

1 | 2 | next page >