(Abstract from Take Control of Your Project - Using Expectation Alignment to Avoid IT Project Failure by Terry Merriman, PCO Associates LLC)

Whether large or small, IT projects are complex change events. They need cross-functional collaboration between two or more departments or teams. Their success or failure reverberates throughout the organization and often impacts customers. Countless studies and papers on reasons for IT Project Failure cite two critical factors:

1. Poor interpersonal communications
2. Lack of professional project management

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. 

This document presents a framework for approaching communications around a typical change initiative, and includes some ideas and recommendations to improve the effort and results.

At a basic level, the primary objectives for communications around a business project are to…

• Create awareness/inform
• Create understanding
• Influence (gain acceptance; enlist support; engage actions/behaviors)

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:

KEY STEPS TO PRODUCE A BLUEPRINT / PLAYBOOK FOR STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION 
Gary Skarke (gskarke@tbointl.com)
Linda Wilson (ljsquare@comcast.net)

Blueprint Purpose: Producing a blueprint (a.k.a. playbook or reference guide) for strategy implementation is a powerful and useful communication tool for group mobilization. It is a tangible symbol that represents a multitude of activities, decisions, commitments and expectations that have been analyzed, debated, refined and agreed upon in order to produce the blueprint.

The scope of impact for your strategy implementation will likely determine whether you do some or all of the steps. It is important to understand that producing a well-received, well-used blueprint is just like executing a major project or building a grand estate – the more you prepare, the fewer steps you skip, the better your chances of having your dream house.

Perfection is great in theory but not in practice. We worked with an organization that wanted to get everything perfect before doing anything.  In practice, what we have seen works the best is to quickly learn from every move, refine your tactics, redeploy – then repeat the cycle.  No organization/person will get everything right.  We live in a very complex world with so many variables. The trick is to execute quickly, learn from that execution, and then re-execute.