In my mangled use of the quote on winning most often attributed to Vince Lombardi¹, I am making the point that for all the focus on other areas of the change process, only realization of the business case really counts.  Most new businesses fail as do most change projects, even if they get through deployment; they fail to deliver expected value.   

Following an email link this morning we downloaded the Orbus Software top 8 CIO priorities¹.  The eight items:

1. Drive change to socially enable the enterprise.  Internally and externally enable and exploit the opportunities afforded by social media.
2. Simplify IT and transform IT funding.  Make IT transparent to the rest of the organization and enable a funding process that is singularly focused on supporting corporate strategy

The Change Activation Toolkit is a learning and implementation resource that solves the engagement & awareness challenges with innovative resources that boost organizational change capability & promote positive change behaviors. 

This document outlines the key ways in which the Change Activation Toolkit offers organizations a compelling value proposition and substantial return on investment.

Summary

In this paper using the needs of regional grocery chains, we state our case for turning the usual rollout of a project management system on its head.  In the typical rollout organizations focus on process first, then enforcing that process on existing activity and finally they develop training to develop new project managers and other participants.  The assumption is “Build it and results will come.” Unfortunately business results don’t always come, and the business is left with an administrative system that can’t justify itself.  We propose a new deployment approach that starts with finding and developing the right people, focuses project reviews on business results, and then develops the supporting planning and execution processes.  Finally with our focus on starting with people, we define the roles required to make this work. 

The Change Acrtivation Toolkit authored by Better Business Learning is now TBO's primary resource for change management training and change project delivery.  We were attracted to the toolkit's innovative structure and easily understood materials.

Business literature is full of ideas on how to design your organization.  The leading ideas that show up repeatedly are designs to make your organization more customer centric¹, designs to improve decision making², and adopting designs that create a measureable improvement³.   All three of these outcomes can be achieved by focusing on an organization’s business processes for the design and understanding the new structure will require a clear focus on the people and teams that do the work for successful implementation.

The following approach has proven successful in previous organization designs: