CASE STUDY
Leaders Develop a Strategic Process to Better Manage Its Portfolio of Change, Resources and Capacity
Challenge
The CEO of a major metropolitan utility realized that his organization could not possibly succeed at every change effort its leadership team had blessed. They did not have the oversight, resources, capacity or means to ensure success, even for their most critical efforts. It appeared that everything was equally important. While every project was legitimate and worthy, the organization was doomed to fail unless it was somehow able to organize a strategic process to get their arms around the mass of change work they had initiated and revise their expectations.
They needed a way to prepare, prioritize, pace, and resource their most strategic of initiatives. The CEO and Enterprise Change Process Leader contracted with Being First to assist them to craft a tailored solution and protocols to create an enterprise-wide change agenda and process.
Solution
As a starting point, the Enterprise Change Process Leader first gathered the names, status and magnitude of all major change initiatives underway or about to be launched in the organization. Being First organized a two-day offsite meeting of the senior leaders to learn about the benefits and elements of an Enterprise Change Agenda process and begin to collaboratively design a process for them.
The leaders tailored protocols for preparing proposed change efforts for consideration, identified criteria to prioritize the efforts that were selected, and created a means to organize their change work so that it could be resourced, launched, paced, supported and evaluated more consciously and successfully. Being First also supported them to implement their Enterprise Change Agenda process and realign the change work they had already launched.
Results
- Significant reduction in change fatigue and negative capacity impacts on the organization
- An ongoing effective system for capacity management was developed and used across the organization
- They designed a template to prepare proposed change initiatives using standard requirements.
- They crafted a means to sequence, resource, measure, and accelerate each year’s change work.
- They built their agreement and confidence to say no to good ideas that could not be accomplished without endangering other priorities.
- Capacity management improved as system stabalized
- They created a reliable, ongoing meeting cadence for considering new initiatives.
- Strategic positioning and application around change efforts made them adaptive to unexpected change.
