PM Insight
Faced with major strategic change,
Pick n Pay has centralised the project
and programme change management
competency within Business Solutions
Delivery, alongside the business analyst
(BA) competency. This is an interesting
positioning.
Earlier this year, the International
Institute of Business Analysis published
their report on trends in business analysis which suggests that BAs will play a
major role in supporting change management. “Business analysis is about
changing how organisations change”
Kathleen Barret, IIBA.
“This is early days for us in developing the change competency. The focus
of change management has primarily been communication and training
which we feel can be expanded upon
to promote not only knowledge and
skills but also engagement in, and embedding of, the change.
This means the change enablement
team is moving up the lifecycle to facilitate change from the early stages.
We know we can do more a lot more
in supporting major change across the
business and while we recognise that
change has to be led by the business, I
know we can do a lot more in smoothing the journey” says Jeandre Williams,
Head of Change and Business Analysis
competence at Pick ‘n Pay.
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Engen Petroleum has for some time
had change managers sitting in IT, but
rather loosely associated with projects.
In bringing change management more
into the IS area, Gail Wildschut, describes how she sees the role of Business
Solutions today.
“We do whatever it takes to get the
solution in and adopted.” Two years
ago Engen invested in improving the
development of business cases and the
identification of benefits cases against
all strategic projects. The focus now is
on identifying business outcomes in
ways that really engage and resonate
with the business.
“We know the case for change must
be stated in ways which touch hearts
if the business is to be engaged in
achieving real change. Before change
management it was always just pushing
solutions at the business.”
Following the development of improved business case approaches,
Engen will be in an excellent position
to realise another goal – to measure the
realisation of benefits. This is not easy
for a variety of reasons, but as Gail commented “...we realised that one thing we
did know was that without adoption
and business ownership we will never
realise the benefits. We could see ways
to easily measure adoption rates and
we focused our efforts there initially.”
PM Africa Magazine — september 2014
Key to implementing this was the categorisation of projects. Engen had put in
place a project categorisation approach
to help with governance decisions –
which projects needed to undergo
which type of governance based upon
a view of size and complexity. This was
extended to capture a view about the
level of change complexity associated
with a project.
“Some projects are more about operational change than technology
– these were the projects we needed
to focus our change effort upon”. Early
on, Engen began to see results from the
measurement of adoption. “Patterns
emerged, for example, one region consistently showed low adoption rates
– we could focus our efforts further and
start to identify the root causes of the
problems.”
“Our projects impact upon the most
valuable assets in our organisation –
our staff. The informal feedback was
clear -we just are not doing enough to
ensure projects are accepted and implemented in the business”. Lise Lotze,
Head: IT & Business Solution Centre in
Metropolitan Health Group(MHG) is
passionate in describing why she thinks
good change management practices
are crucial to improving the perceived
value of IT to the business.
“We have known this was important
for a while and I’m not convinced that
project managers have the right skills
to address some of the more complex
change issues. 5-10% maybe have
the skills naturally but for most project managers this is not where their
strengths lie – they want to finish the
project and get on with the next one”.
In MHG the establishment of change
management support is in its early
stages but already there is lots of interest in the business. As Lise commented
“Every project sponsor wants a change
management team now”, but she is also
concerned to make sure the change
consultancy support provided is correctly positioned. “There is a danger
that change management is seen as a