FAQ

Agile as a methodology has been around for about 10 years. It originated in the software world as a way of accelerating the cycle between user experience and design/development effort. The idea behind agile was to accelerate the innovation cycle - i.e. reduce the time and cost of getting a product to a stage where it was “deployable” into production or monetized.

With higher numbers of feedback cycles and quicker feedback per cycle, development could be accelerated. In organizations, the implications are that design and development pathways can be shorter - but the downside is that user involvement and feedback tends to increase. As a consequence, waterfall approaches which tend to integrate initiatives into portfolio decision-making by phase, can require additional flexibility to allow for agile cycles or loops to complete or be extended in order to address emerging or newly discovered dimensions requiring development.

Due to the higher degree of involvement of existing users in the effort, coordinating roll-outs of multiple initiatives being developed under an agile approach, flexibility in the prioritization of own and licensed-in resources as well as schedule flexibility for initiative testing and implementation is essential. Waterfall approaches which take these dimensions into account tend to be better prepared for the inevitable changes to scheduling and resourcing inherent in agile development efforts.

Aligning communications and change impact assessments as development shifts to implementation in this framework becomes a critical process.

There must be maximum consistency between your words, your own personal behavior, how your subordinates act, and the compensation, organizational structure, performance appraisal and promotion/selection policies of your company. When these facets are in alignment, employees will receive a consistent message as to what is important and what they need to do to make your company succeed.

In reality, resistance is a natural human element that actually is full of wisdom. Understanding the nature of resistance is therefore a process of inquiring into the resistance to understand it better. When jobs and roles are changing - or worse, being eliminated, no amount of avoidance will change that fact. But applying empathic questioning, listening closely for what underlying issues really are, is the best way to avoid the worst part of the tendency to react to resistance - which is to plow forward and push the change through. Like the old adage of trying to teach a pig to sing, it never ends well - both the pig and the teacher will come away frustrated - and worse, no change will actually take place.

Change methodology is either a hot topic at the water cooler because of the types of issues that Agile processes are raising as it gets applied to almost every facet of business these days… or it’s rapidly fading into the horizon in the face of agile implementation taking over even the change management and change implementation conversation. “We don’t need change management. We do Agile”.

We’re cognizant of sounding biased in this response, but there may be at least a few reasons not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to considering a change methodology even if you’ve already long gone Agile.

Let’s begin with the Agile methodology. Implementation is different in an Agile environment because Agile involves cycles of design, testing, reviewing and re-gigging the pieces that need re-working until something useful is produced. The focus is on speed of innovation and turning out a “good-enough” prototype that can have the kinks worked out later.

But implementation in Agile is still a longer-term game in the sense that new processes and ways of working take time to get up to speed and meet expected return rates to justify initial saving calculations. It’s a mix - and successful organizations understand that the people element is still the make-or-break piece that requires engagement, re-visiting and assurance that things are on the right track. Getting someone to your App once can be done relatively easily. But keeping them there is the jackpot.

So we’re back to successful implementation as a measure, even in Agile environments. If you’re delivering successfully in Agile, you still may not be delivering full value if the outputs are not monetized successfully - or at least as initially expected. This uptake flow - i.e. how successful implementation is on the back-end of Agile processes, is where change methodology can be helpful - tracking required adoption-oriented sponsorship, assessing the new organization capabilities required to support new developments and optimizing the uptake of outputs of the Agile process on impacted stakeholder communities.

There are very few critical things to get right when organizational change succeeds. Among them are:

The key thing to understand about ensuring success for your change is that success factors vary with the following aspects.

1. The size of your change: large scale change requires much more infrastructure - defining the portfolio, it’s components and initiatives, the sequencing of initiatives to ensure key foundational elements are in place before others, KPI’s defined correctly for installation and adoption (uptake) segments, implementing phases, steps and appropriate gating and decision-making governance and oversight, installing “fit-for-purpose” advisory committees to review and assure that key elements are included in the change effort. For a detailed assessment of sizing, see DCMi Platform’s “size and scale of change management” assessment.
2. Change Management style: Style of change management boils down to matching the leadership style with the urgency level. It behooves no one to do extensive consultation when a fire is raging - and thus adopting the appropriate leadership and management style fo the change is critical to get right. See DCMi Platform’s “size of change and style of change management” self-assessment.
3. The length of time over which the change will be implementing: change programs which outlast sponsors and change leadership require careful resource planning to assure that key players who move on are adequately replaced. Failure of change begins and ends with sponsorship, and longer program simply require adequate planning for key resources at the sponsor, governance, PMO/CMO, change team leaders and other personnel. For a detailed assessment of need for longer programs, see DCMi Platform’s “size and scale of change management” assessment.

Beyond these initial considerations, the best we can suggest is to run DCMi Platform’s implementation risk assessment based on the DCMi PlatformTM SuccessFactors database. Since each change situation is unique, the risk assessment process enables a prioritization of key factors of most importance to your situation, test that against the success factors database for timing and sequencing, and most important of all, self-assess your team and organization’s change skill levels to ensure that sufficient capability and capacity have been identified.

In today’s world, two things warrant against consultants. First, change is changing so quickly that no consultant can bring in “experience” that fits your situation. So your consultant will be learning along with you - at your expense. Second, with software and knowledge at your finger tips, these days you can rapidly upskill your leaders and teams on the basics of change more rapidly than let someone else bring in supposed expertise that you think you don’t have.

At a minimum, what a consultant can - and should bring - to your change implementation are the following:

• Broad knowledge in Change methods, research, literature & experience; depth in several of the major required core areas (governance, decision-making, portfolio & initiative set-up and management, large scale change experience, cross-cultural interventions, change leadership, etc.)
• Capability and depth in the type and nature of change methods so that the change approach applied can best match the situation at hand (training and/or degree in change management plus 5-10 years of application experience either as an internal or external (consultant))
• Psychological and psychodynamic training: Individual coaching skills, training and experience for one-on-one work (in particular with senior executives); behavioral team dynamics skills & experience for team and sub-group interventions; and system level skills for culture and organization level interventions.

There is a very famous saying that you will hear from change practitioners from time to time that goes like this: “if you find yourself working harder than your sponsor, there’s something important that you’re missing”.

Essentially, this same moniker could be said to apply to this question.

Under normal conditions of success, change initiatives, and in particular strategic initiative portfolios (which are resultant construct of organizational transformations), require as a basic tenet, that the CEO be the champion of their delivery. There is plenty of literature - and failed initiatives - which points to this fundamentally consistent theme.

So if you find yourself wondering why the organization is expecting you to be the sponsor of a significant initiative or portfolio that is delivered beyond your control authority, you would be well advised to re-consider accepting the lead role for the project.

If your CEO requires convincing of change management, this one fact - i.e. that as CEO, they should already be sponsoring the work, could be Reason#1 why they may want to consider bringing that capability in.

Risks associated with change implementation can be accounted for in different ways. So this question takes us back to the framework for risk management put in place to cover the enterprise’s risk. At the highest level, an enterprise’s ERM process manages risks which pose a threat to organization’s survival.

In today’s environment, the rise of the Internet, automation, AI, machine learning and technologically-driven changes dominate CEO agendas. Many organizations are orienting ERM systems to manage the increases in volatility and impact of technology on existing business models.

How important people risks become in this context depends on the importance of the organization’s talent pool to its survival strategies. Automation and robotics means that organizational talent widens to include people as well as the knowledge processes they will convert, own and run on behalf of the organization.

In this context, assessing the risk of the business to changes in the skills and competencies in the talent pool becomes increasingly important, not less. Does the organization have the skills and capabilities required to deliver the strategy when the transformation nears completion? And does the organization have the number of resources and requisite skills required to deliver the transformation?

In the first case, incorporating risk-assessed talent management strategies for the organization’s talent pool would be a good place to start the ERM level risk.

In the second case, adopting a people-risk implementation approach and framework for the transformation would enable the organization to assess the people-risk inherent in delivering the transformation.

If you’re not familiar with these terms, either your project or change isn’t sufficiently significant in size or impact to warrant differentiating the skills, roles and deliverables between them (PMO: Project Management Office, CMO: Change Management Office)

Or if you are familiar with them, then it’s quite possible that your experience with them contains some memories of conversations about how to set them up - and what to do with the PM and CM parts… and how tricky that conversation can sometimes get.

Are they different? Can PM resources do CM tasks…? Vice-versa? And what are resulting implications for resourcing the MO for the change you’re considering?

Given our experience that this conversation is alive in most organizations at some level, and increasingly so given the pervasiveness of digital transformation, here are some initial thoughts around how to start, contribute to or advance getting to a reasonable answer to the debate of how to structure your MO with happy P’s and C’s (If you have additional comments, we’d love to hear from you!).

We would consider 3 conversations helpful in assessing your response to the PMO/CMO question.

First, have you agreed a standard process for your change and project activities over time? In a previous step you would have recognized that the size of the change component in your transformation or strategic initiative portfolio is significant. A standard process discussion would involve assessing the skills required in the overall delivery of the change - both from a project management and change management point of view. At a minimum, you would be agreeing an overall breakdown of who does what when in the process; What reporting requirements are for the critical decisions in your gating process (project risks and change risks); and how change skills fit in with delivery schedules and milestones (how much time to respond to PM vs CM needs).

Second have a thought as to the role that project management and change management have in your situation. Is project management strict - looking to provide guidance, consistency, oversight and/or compliance oriented? Or is it looser, possibly decentralized, and looking to track/react vs pro-actively screen? Similarly with change resources - are you looking to resource change capability for urgent “fire-fighting” or “critical items only”? Or are you looking to build capability, intervene pro-actively, or create strategic intervention teams which are called to action based on trigger points set on customized digital dashboards…? Depending on your change, your optimal configuration of PM and CM roles may be different. In the end, projects don’t manage change, they manage projects - and change resources don’t deliver projects, they deliver change. How one defines these two elements - project and change management - is at the heart of the answer that will work in your situation.

As a third consideration, go to the end of the transformation process and ask yourself the change capacity question: given the change I see coming, where is the low-hanging fruit to address change capacity - and do I supplement those capacity constraints with either PM or CM resourcing? And what aspects of my CMO and PMO can be digitized or automated to better enable successful implementation?

If you’re knew to PMO/CMO’s and have become curious about C vs P in your MO and how to leverage the abilities inherent between the two, you’ll at least recognize the debate when it makes itself known.

This question might also refer to the question on how to get one’s CEO to see that change is important.

In our experience, having leaders “serious” about what’s required to deliver the “change” part of a change or initiative boils down to how important the change (behavioral, cultural, human), component is, and whether that is a major factor required to the initiative’s success. That’s one part. The second is whether the leaders themselves will be required to take on the post-implementation organization.

It is what it is. Being able to assess leadership authenticity in the context of change is a key variable that both internal and external stakeholders look to in times of significant change. How Leaders behave sends signals, and our human condition is highly attuned to detecting when divergences exist. When what Leaders say and do diverge.

Muddying the water more is that, more often than not, real-life situations can be less than optimal. In other words, it may be that a difficult or untenable situations takes hold that have no realistic chance of changing or being dislodged. These are highly stressful situations that often lead to burn-out and other similar outcomes.

Having leaders not implicated or not authentically role modeling commitment to the change increases ambiguity for others. It may be understandable situationally but experiencing that disconnect repeatedly over time can be highly counter productive. Being able to detect real and authentic commitment and ownership for a change is a key variable in engaging others in delivering the change.

We will take this at its literal level, because it has a philosophical dimension to it as well.

But practically speaking, changing behavior can be immediate. At an individual level we do it every year at New Year’s - or anytime we commit to changing the way we live and operate our daily lives.

Organizationally, if a new regulatory requirement is required, and delivering on it requires significant changes that must be done, those changes can be instantaneous.

But witness how many New Year’s resolutions really stick. Whether, in fact, they last.

At the other end of the spectrum, large scale changes, think of Climate Change - and our long-standing inability to change collectively in order to address it over the last 30 years. An excellent example of how lasting change can also be incredibly difficult.

So without belaboring the point, implementing lasting change - i.e. changes that last - requires changing something and sticking to it - either because of or in spite of the metrics used to evaluate whether the change was “worth it” or successful.

And while it’s true that there are lots of examples where lasting change doesn’t stick, the incredible thing is - like going to the moon, addressing AIDS, and changing the culture of how we treat women in the workplace - there are are also examples where lasting change has not only taken root and established itself; it has also created lasting solutions that have drastically improved the lives of those who came after.

The DCMi Platform implementation platform differentiates itself in the change implementation space along three dimensions. The first is approaching change management as implementation activities that can be assessed via a risk framework over an implementation time period. Second, those activities can be tracked and evaluated in real time. Third, DCMi Platform enables these factors and dimensions to be rated by individuals, groups and other organizational entities, and these subjective perceptions, viewpoints and inputs captured and compared in a completely confidential environment.

The result is that real-time changes internal to the organization can be continually validated in the light of different baseline success factors. With repeated use, tracking changes with these parameters can be digitalized to enable custom dashboards and other automated processes to indicate implementation success paths in real time for teams. What does that mean for you? No 3-day workshops to learn about change management. To the contrary, you can immediately access and begin working on your change and use DCMi Platform's applications to fill the gaps of where you need to go and what you need to do as you go. DCMi Platform brings together change methods, activities, data – and a place to track it – all in one place.

DCMi Platform’s approach combines depth and expertise in large scale change implementation together with digital and automated change processes. The various applications harness today’s technology (digitalization, automation and change analytics) to bring to life real-time data of most relevance to change implementation team actions and processes.

DCMi Platform enables organizations to baseline, track and improve according to the 3 key dimensions of change: Return on Change Investment, Return on Change Engagement and Return on Change Knowledge Management & Infrastructure.

DCMi Platform is actually not a start-up company. It’s a digital platform. Straticom Technologies is the company that developed DCMi Platform and has been incorporated in Geneva since 2011. The R&D company that continues to develop DCMi Platform is incorporated since 2016 and is based in Toronto. The DCMi Platform change implementation software productivity platform was first released in 2017. Straticom was originally set up in 1996 in Geneva as a consulting, advisory and services delivery organization specializing in formulating and delivering solutions for business transformation and change management.

DCMi Platform is committed to protecting your privacy. Security measures such as restricted access to offices and information, the use of passwords and encryption and implementing and complying with the ISO 27001 Information Security standard have been adopted to protect your Personal/Company Information against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification. DCMi Platform employees have been trained to respect your privacy and those employees with access to your Personal Information shall use your Personal Information strictly in accordance with the DCMi Platform Privacy Policy and the laws applicable to DCMi Platform business. The DCMi Platform platform is a SAAS solution and all communication between your computer/tablet/mobile device and the DCMi Platform platform is encrypted and secured via SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security).

As a software platform DCMi Platform was first trade registered in 2016. As a professional service organization providing doing advisory, consulting, research and program evaluation in successful change implementation, Straticom Technologies sarl was incorporated 7 years prior to that in Geneva (the R&D entity was incorporated in Toronto in 2016). Straticom has been run as a sole proprietorship consultancy in change and transformation since 1996.

The DCMi Platform platform is being used in a wide variety of installation situations and by a widely differing spectrum of companies. From a user perspective, DCMi Platform is used by individuals and teams mostly. There are numerous applications, all focussed on engaging the organization in tasks aimed at reducing ambiguity, improving alignment & creating the opportunity to re-align once further changes occur. Second, is the perspective of organizations using DCMi Platform. Aside from the classic large organization situation which uses DCMi Platform to digitalize, standardize and automate elements of their change implementation workflow, there is a wide range including research and educational organizations using DCMi Platform to explore various learning dimensions in change implementation, not-for-profit organizations assessing change implementation risks, large organizations putting private-label e-learning modules to automate & standardize learning on change implementation, and many other public and private organizations at various stages of maturity in digitizing their change implementation processes.

Data analytics and the possibilities opening to organizations (via IoT (Internet of Things), ML (Machine Learning), AI (Artificial Intelligence), robotics & automation) have grown rapidly in the last few years. Organizations stand to benefit enormously. In the change management and implementation space, the story is no different.

Digitization and digitalization of the change space is occurring rapidly, enabling live implementation dashboards, instantaneous feedback loops, real-time updates of digital dashboards, and virtual engagement that will approach and soon overtake face-to-face engagement in its effectiveness and ability to engage and reduce resistance to change.

Many organizations are at different stages in this journey, and accordingly will benefit by matching correctly their needs for real-time and other data with the type of analytics best suited to their needs. DCMi Platform addresses all three dimensions of data analytics for change: descriptive analytics, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.

DCMi Platform focuses on the first two analytics categories - descriptive and predictive analytics. For the most part, the time-sensitivity and the challenge of gathering, collating and bringing together previously unrelated or un-connected data from different parts of the organization means that change implementation can be significantly enhanced through descriptive analytics. When you had no idea that implementation risk enabled you to compare and contrast risk appetites, and that that is a leading indicator of resistance, just knowing that can be revealing. It can also be threatening - and so such information needs to be carefully evaluated so that it can be used in the most helpful way.

The second type of analytics, predictive, is the ability to make sense of situations and choices from chaotic situations, where ambiguity and/or lack of data is high. Or, conversely, where choices and ambiguities stemming from an overload of data is high. In such situations, it’s not the answer per se that is important, but the “top 3” factors that are known to be present - and testing for them - that brings value. When situations are fluid and unknowns are high, predictive analytics in change implementation bring significant value by identifying previously unseen patterns, reducing ambiguity and unknowns, and enabling hypothesis testing to create success pathways faster and at significantly lower cost to the organization.

The third dimension, prescriptive analytics, enables organizations to make statements about situations with extremely high degrees of confidence. It’s very likely that you will rise in the morning and stand up, given that a significant data set exists that demonstrates that that is exactly what happens when sleep ends and the day begins. Such high-confidence statements are examples of prescriptive analytics, and also increasingly they are finding their way into the change implementation space.

The short answer is no - you could use DCMi Platform’s SuccessProfilor and other applications to plan, mobilize, design, build, evaluate & monitor the success path for a small project with only one location and one change. You would not maximize the return of all of the platform’s features of course.

That occurs in our experience at a minimum of either 100 people (i.e. 1 team of 10 and a number of wider dispersed implementation teams) or where the practical limits of meeting physically are reached. In other words, the more your situation tends toward virtual working and/or multiple layers of strategic, operational and tactical decision-making units and/or geographic regions that span time-zones. And in particular, where benefits can be gained from the automation and digitalization of change activities.

In terms of project size, as your project tends towards higher levels of complexity DCMi Platform’s platform becomes more relevant. Complexity dimensions include the number of initiatives in the portfolio exceeding 20-25, the time span for implementation going beyond 2 years (suggesting adoption as well as installation objectives), the impacted community tending towards multiple layers (i.e. global, regional and local implementation teams, or more complex multi-stakeholder organizations such as public-private-community partnerships), or where the implementation portfolio consists of running initiatives across functional or business lines and hierarchies.

With respect to reaching a maximum size, there are certainly well known special case conditions for what are known as “mega-projects”. In our experience DCMi Platform’s platform can still be applied to these special projects. Typically, dimensions of these projects are consistent with DCMi Platform’s model, with even more stringent focus brought bear on governance, sponsorship, decision-making & gating actions and owners.

One-off limited use licenses for single-use DCMi Platform applications can either be trialed for free or accessed for as little as USD$299/user. Pro and Enterprise versions of these applications (i.e. unlimited use licenses for up to a year) can be available at around $99-$150/user. The Enterprise version of the platform can be custom configured, and a base installation of a minimum of 3 applications for one year per function or business unit is required.