Why they didn't choose our competitors -
8 secrets in change management execution

Originally published in the February 2022 issue of 'The Lean Mag'

• 10.03.2022

Introduction

This past summer we celebrated our six-year anniversary as an enterprise continuous improvement and change management software-as-a-service offering. Our competitors include the likes of Microsoft, Trello, Monday.com, and Jira. Although I pushed myself to enjoy the wonderful beaches of South Italy, my home since our launch in early 2016, there were very few moments when turning off my mobile phone was an option.

For us, the aftershock of the pandemic has brought opportunities of all sorts and to say the least, this past summer our team was stretched to its limits. In the midst of our managing our regular daily business we were also bringing on board four new clients simultaneously test piloting our change management strategy deployment software and counting on our team for our daily expertise. Although we suffered greatly, we grew exponentially.

With the smoke of Covid-19 clearing in most countries, growth-oriented companies big and small seeking work-from-home solutions have officially brought digital transformation back to Board Room agendas. Our team has seen this first hand in our experiences servicing clients looking to adopt cloud-based technology for enhanced digital control and execution governance. With an effective work-from-home business contingency process now mandatory for most corporations, the incentives to digitise all aspects of your business are even greater. For most companies, gone are the days that company know-how should disappear into thin air the moment a process specialists changes job.

Our secret unveiled - the big pivot to P-D-C-A

Most start-ups at least once in their early years undergo the famous 'pivot', the moment where they refine their offering to capture a more specific market segment while re-engineering their product. We entered the world of enterprise software convinced that there is a deep gap in the market in continuous improvement and process excellence cloud-based solutions. Furthermore, we believe most companies to this day are still not digitising their process portfolio the way they should be and are suffering for it. Finally, we believe that such areas of interest are only going to grow as the days of authoritarian bottom-line business management philosophies are out of style. What is in style are employee & customer centric organisations who leverage diversity, economies of scale and cross-border collaboration models to optimise their value proposition. Dynamic companies of such cannot be successful without a deep connection between their employees and the processes they collectively own. Having spent 17 years as a change manager in forward-thinking multinational organisations, it is quite clear that the management of any knowledge about business processes, if kept offline and not readily available to all the staff, is bad news for expansion-focused businesses as it will eventually be lost in the daily shuffle.

In our first two years we failed-fast and failed-forward continuously as we did hundreds of product demos discovering each time that we were missing one or more critical elements that the buyer was looking for. Our offering was more focused on the capturing and communication of waste reduction opportunities but less focused on the execution aspect. Our big business discovery was in the sad reality that most decision makers have difficulty parting with their money without the guarantee of seeing and feeling immediate cash-related results from their investment.

Our big take-away after hundreds of unsuccessful product demos was the move towards process orchestration and automatic work flows for task, ticket and issue management. With each demo and feedback from the dissatisfied client prospect, one-by-one we remedied each product gap highlighted.

In 2018, together with the M.A.H.Y. Khoory Group of Dubai we built and launched our first version of PRESTO PDCA which helped us iron out bottlenecks in our P-D-C-A (plan-do-check-act) algorithm. The launch allowed 400 licensed users a seamless end-to-end experience in the capture, analysis, and closure of operational issues covering a company of more than 2,000 employees.

This became our official pivot point as we began targeting and acquiring clients challenged with execution delivery and seeking ticket and change management automated support. In doing so, this also unlocked opportunities to make our product more attractive to small companies with limited budgets seeking a complete all-in-one business management system that marries project management with talent, strategy and business process management functions. Truly unique and unprecedented value that to my knowledge has not been challenged by any SaaS offering to date.

Why they didn't go to our competitors

In 3 out of the 4 test pilots from last summer, the company CEO had a direct relationship with our team in the planning and execution of our joint initiative. In all test pilots, the CEO's direct reports were actively involved in the decision-making process.

Throughout the course of each test pilot, I took the opportunity to explore what each senior leader liked about our product, our team, and above all, why they chose not to go with the competitor offering.

At the risk of exposing insight to our competition as to why they are losing customers to us but in the spirit of best practice sharing for the collective good of the field of enterprise change management, it is my pleasure to explain how our post-Covid 19 experiences uncovered some of the greatest voids and misconceptions that the majority of the project management software products in the market have still yet to discover.

In its essence, Lean and Lean principles play a big role in the missing key element of the project management platforms that are not pulling their weight in the area of enterprise change governance.

Transparency, accountability and true sense of urgency are still major challenges for software platforms that are looking to unlock large-scale change management potential.

In closing

As our team stops to reflect on the lessons learnt of last year and prepares for another challenging year of growth ahead, we are delighted to share our findings. We offer these 8 discoveries to the business leaders responsible for strategy deployment and execution but that are still fearful, uncertain and dubious about the enterprise change management software market and the ability of their team to embrace it.

8 KEY LESSONS ABOUT ENTERPRISE CHANGE MANAGEMENT FROM 4 GROWTH-FOCUSED CEOs

• 1. Execution is everything - Our clients after working with us for some time often begin to explore the concept of waste management and process improvement but this usually doesn't come before we've helped them get their project management portfolio under control using an automated P-D-C-A discipline. Offering 360° enterprise transparency into P-D-C-A will put your leadership team in a position to quickly identify your biggest bottlenecks and commit to unlock your full execution potential.
• 2. CEOs want to be more hands-on - the days of delegating to subordinates and asking for a quarterly status update which usually consists of an enormous PowerPoint presentation detailing key results and critical tasks are coming to an end. Collaboration-based software now allows high-level executives the possibility to zoom in to the most granular level of detail of a department's project portfolio and roll everything back up for a 10,000-foot aggregated view in just a couple of clicks. As software users, senior management can now be involved on a daily basis governing progress while using their discretion when to intervene directly. In Lean Management terms, this is the true sense of 'going to the Gemba' especially in the services world where key value chain hand offs are often electronic and multi-geographical.
• 3. Most companies still have difficulty with role definition - The marriage between the P-D-C-A discipline and the RACI accountability matrix is not a difficult concept to put in place but it is still rarely used in companies managing large-scale change. The PDCA logic offers 4 critical phases to a project's life cycle. The role allocation of each PDCA phase should be carefully thought out to ensure the proper level of management is engaged at the right moment. See diagram that follows
• 4. Lessons learnt are rarely shared effectively - The so-called 'forgetting curve' is real and the level of neglect when capturing and disseminating lessons learnt in the field in real time as knowledge is acquired is disturbing. CEOs know this and are starting to understand the impact this has on their bottom line. Use the P-D-C-A logic to reduce the risk of losing freshly acquired know-how by ensuring the last phase of the cycle is dedicated to acting on lessons learnt (see diagram). This model must be agreed at the CEO level, implemented and sustained by the senior management team.
• 5. Less software users, more human contribution - Most project management software solutions promote that every employee in the company should be a direct product user spending the entirety of their work day commenting, updating and uploading information to their assigned projects. This works well when the stakeholders are limited to small groups of people managing projects that don't require company-wide visibility. This works less well however in an enterprise setting when a PMO is responsible for hundreds of projects and require that they are all handled in a standard manner across their organisation. With too much product engagement information becomes watered down, overlapping and difficult to report. Furthermore, from our 2021 experiences, we found some very significant advantages to adopting a model where middle and senior managers are the primary software users relying on daily discussions with contributors and stakeholders for status updates.
• 6. The Gantt chart is overrated - I can confirm that most of our clients rarely use the Gantt chart in the day-to-day management of projects and tasks. It is useful yes, however in special moments when reporting. The kanban however is a much more effective visual representation in the day-to-day management of change which gives visibility into where each project is in its life cycle and where bottlenecks are slowing things down.
• 7. Less mobile device usage = more concentration - Let's face it, if it is necessary that you are glued to a hand-held device to perform detailed task administration, then something has gone awfully wrong. With the exception to shop floor issues and ticket management, project management is not mobile device dependent and requires a high level of concentration, deep flow thinking, cognitive skills and minimal distractions. As we trend towards 4-day work weeks and raise the bar for work-life balance standards, CEOs should count on a well-designed enterprise software platform to make sure their staff maximise productivity during work-hours leaving our private life for the family. Forward-thinking PMOs know this very well and prefer a laptop-friendly software product that has e-mail alert message capabilities to send automatic customisable notifications to project stakeholders reminding them of their commitments.
• 8. Leverage your PMO for recurring process oversight - With the transparency and automated discipline offered by a robust enterprise change management platform, companies can now engage their PMOs to oversee process orchestration creating new alliances and meaningful relationships with business operations and change management staff. This means that those responsible for standard recurring processes (e.g., weekly reporting) can count on the support of their PMOs to oversee execution and delivery in each step of the P-D-C-A cycle. CEOs have realised this by knowing very well the value in automating recurring process management and as seen in our efforts from last year, are ready to take leaps of faith to extinguish the enormous administrative burden associated with keeping activities of such offline.

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