Senior managers need to have roadmaps too

By John White

October 2004

Imagine the scene: you are in a large operating theatre full of people in gowns and masks, you can see an ice packed box labelled 'donor heart', you suddenly realise you can't move a muscle - you are the patient! But worse, you remember you should be having your appendix out.

Someone, who you later realise is the chief surgeon, speaks. "OK everyone, I'd  just like to emphasise how important it is to get this heart swap thing right - we  really do want to keep this patient alive, don't we? This will all be pretty technical  and complex. Nurse Smith, you've done this sort of thing before - can you talk us  through your plan, please?"

"Yes sir," says the theatre nurse, "we're going to have to work quite quickly because I know the administrator has got another operation pencilled in for mid-day. The outline plan, because I know you don't like a lot of detail, is take the old heart out, put the new one in, connect everything up and away we go."

"Sounds good," says the chief surgeon with others nodding in general agreement, "so where shall we start?"

"Well," says the nurse with slight unease, "I guess we make an incision sir, we do have the patient properly under anaesthetic don't we?"...

It would be a nightmare scenario and real surgeons do, of course, know what to do, but unfortunately many financial groups, large and small, try to manage large complex change programmes making very basic errors just like our imaginary operating theatre. Figure 1 lists some of these basic errors all of which can be seen in our imaginary operation.

Figure 1

Unlike real-life surgeons, sponsors and steering group members cannot be technically expert in every aspect of the change programme but they do need to know what should happen next and what the right result should look like.

They should insist on being fully involved, making sure that they, not technicians, are taking all the key decisions about the future of their business.

Some senior managers who have experienced complex change programmes have realised that all involved need a common language and an agreed practical method to manage the change - a change management roadmap. Unfortunately there is not much available to fit the need. Project management methodologies like PRINCE 2 are focused on the needs of project managers, not steering group members.

Six Sigma is closer but very process/testing oriented and uses terminology that many senior people find off putting. We think that most financial groups should build their own roadmap by capturing their change management best practice.

The high level structure of a change management roadmap is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Importantly the roadmap must:

• balance people and technical aspects

• be in plain English

• guide senior and technical management

• be easy to use, adapt and evolve.

A roadmap document does not have to be long, but it can make a big difference to the success of a change programme and how much of the intellectual capital generated in a programme is retained by an organisation.

So if you want to drive a programme towards a better destination get a roadmap and let it be your guide all the way.