7 Reasons Why Projects Succeed - Webinar onDemand...

The survey results are filled with insights and best practices that we have successfully adapted for procurement transformation projects around the world. If you are a procurement change agent, this is the resource for you.

This February I was excited to see a box on my desk postmarked from Prosci® with the 2016 edition included! In this white paper I will touch the surface of the survey results by discussing the top project success contributors identified in the research and the related procurement transformation best practices that you can utilise to increase your project success

When is Change Management Important?Before we dive in, it is important to clarify that the importance of change management to the success of a project varies based upon the nature of the project. As you look to apply the success contributors in this paper to your projects, stop and take a

moment to consider that some projects require more behavioural changes than others. Creating a simple pie chart and weighing the relative importance of people, process and tools to your business case is a simple but effective way to weigh the importance of change management to your project success.

In the examples below, if we assume both projects are pursuing a business case of 10 million dollars in financial impact, we would place a much greater emphasis on deploying change management success factors in the Supplier Segmentation and Qualification programme than the Transportation Bid Optimisation project:

Digging deeper into the Supplier Segmentation and Qualification process, we can use the ratios from the pie chart to weight 45% of the 10 million dollars in project value as hinging on successful behavioural change, or 4.5 million dollars.

7 Reasons Why Projects Succeed

Every two years since 2009 I anxiously await the release of results of the Best Practices in Change Management benchmarking survey from Prosci®, a change management firm focused on helping individuals and organisations build change management capabilities. Why? Because it has become one of my most effective go-to resources for helping customers succeed with procurement projects.

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By John Shaw, VP, Customer Success, BravoSolution

The information contained in this document has been supplied to you by BravoSolution who are CIPS’s Knowledge Partner for eProcurement/eSourcing.CIPS takes no responsibility for any loss or damage in anyway arising from your interpretation or use of this information.To find out more about Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply visit www.cips.org or call +44 (0)1780 756777 or email [email protected]. CIPS, Easton House, Church Street, Easton on the Hill, Stamford, Lincolnshire, PE9 3NZ

http://www.bravosolution.com

Using some additional data from Prosci® (see correlation with meeting project objectives) we can see that the difference between doing a poor versus excellent job at change management on our Supplier Segmentation and Qualification is the difference between achieving 12% of that 4.5 million dollars or 94% of it!

My conclusion? When behavioural change is a critical part of a project’s success, these success contributors generate concrete business value. So let’s dive into seven success factors that you can use to increase your procurement project’s success.

YOUR SEVEN STEP CHECKLIST FOR PROJECT SUCCESS#7: Engagement with Middle ManagersMiddle managers play an interesting and unique role in procurement projects. Consider that they are individuals who need time to go through their own individual acceptance of change and they are critical leaders who in turn need to lead employees through change. These should be viewed as two separate steps.

One of the more common scenarios I see is central procurement teams struggling to drive solution adoption in local procurement teams. The central team utilises strategic processes and tools well while the local procurement team states that they do not have time to use the tools. As you dig deeper, the local procurement team members often have direct reporting lines to a local plant, business unit or general manager. The managers control the day-to-day priorities of local procurement, not the central procurement team.

The best practice is to engage the managers separately, in advance of local procurement. Spend time helping them understand why the organisation needs them to use the new solution, listen to their objections and work with them to develop a plan to incorporate the solution into their priorities. Ultimately, when it is time to communicate a process change to the local procurement team, it should be from their manager’s voice.

#6: Frequent & Open CommunicationsThis one is a classic best practice and one that is dangerously easy to check the box on. Since we could write a white paper on this topic alone, let’s focus on a common misconception: The Project Team Should Be Communicating with Impacted Stakeholders.

The best practice is for the project team to be a part of designing and supporting the communication plan, but much of the execution of the communication plan should fall largely to direct supervisors and executives. It also reinforces our previous best practice on the importance of engaging middle management early in the process because that middle management team needs to be an active communicator for project success.


Source: Best Practices in Change Management – 2016 Prosci®

Source: Best Practices in Change Management – 2016 Prosci®




#5: Employee Engagement & ParticipationHow often do you conduct a stakeholder analysis? Whether you are rolling out an MRO contract, building a supplier qualification programme, or tracking savings from negotiation through realisation, there are non-procurement stakeholders whose participation will impact your success. The first step in engaging them is to identify them!

Early in your project, just after assembling your project team, take the time to conduct a basic stakeholder analysis. In its simplest form, a 2x2 Mendenlov Matrix will help you build a strategy for how to approach each stakeholder group. If your team is resisting, draw a parallel to the importance of how the Kraljic Matrix impacted how we approach suppliers. Once you have completed your analysis, spend some time considering the needs of each group and how the needs will change across the project’s lifecycle. If you want to get deeper into understanding individual change needs, spend some time reading about ADKAR, a methodology for understanding how individuals change.

Once you have the matrix complete, share it with the sample stakeholders and you may find yourself surprised by how your perceptions of stakeholders vary from theirs. For example, a couple of years ago I was working with a customer on a stakeholder analysis early in the project cycle. The project was for a major oil and gas company (excess of $50 billion in revenue) on the rollout of a sourcing and project workflow solution. After completing our Mendenlov Matrix we had placed the customer’s project manager in the key stakeholder quadrant, indicating that they were both very influential and very interested in the project success.

When we validate this with the project manager, he indicated that he was not ‘very interested’ because his manager placed the urgency of the project lower on his priority list and his annual evaluation criteria. With support from our sponsor, we were able to correct this prioritisation, avoiding a disengaged project manager and ultimately eroded customer ROI.

#3: Dedicated Change Management Resources (Yes, we are going out of order on this one.)

Let’s start this best practice out with a definition for change management:

Change management is the discipline that guides how we prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive organizational success and outcomes.

While all changes are unique and all individuals are unique, decades of research shows there are actions we can take to influence people in their individual transitions. Change management provides a structured approach for supporting the individuals in your organisation to move from their own current states to their own future states.

- Source: Best Practices in Change Management – 2016 Prosci®

When you consider change management as a discipline, with decades of research and structured, proven tools, it becomes much easier to consider the inclusion of a change management professional on your team for your larger change projects. Remember though, not all projects have an equal amount of people change and a dedicated professional may not make sense on every project.

Pragmatically speaking, there will be many incremental projects in any procurement transformation. One of the questions I encourage procurement executives to consider is if they need to develop an organisational capability for continuous change. This is a critical question as it changes the conversation from project resourcing to assessing the overall portfolio of projects that make up the transformation, and understanding the need for change resources across that portfolio. Often when you look across an entire project portfolio the case for change management resources becomes much clearer.





With justification for change resources at a portfolio level, you can make the determination of which projects will benefit most from a dedicated change management professional, which would benefit from professional coaching and which do not require support.

#4: Integration & Engagement between Project & Change Management

This best practice involves the intersection of two professional disciplines, project management and change management. There are many models out there for integrating the two. Some favour independent teams while others have a joint project office. My personal preference is a combined project office with a single high level project plan that covers the technical, process and people aspects of the overall program. On the change side, some of the top themes I look for to help understand if a project plan is covering the people side of the equation include:

• Are we identifying sponsors and stakeholders early in the process?

• Are sponsors getting engaged as part of the project startup?• Does the plan have work streams for key change activities

(communications, training, sponsorship engagement, middle management engagement, measurement and reinforcement)?

• Are resources being assigned to these activities with deliverables and timelines?

If you are interested in getting deeper into assessing how a project plan drives change, check out this video: “A Practical Approach to Change Management.”

#2: Structured Change Management ApproachHow many versions of a strategic sourcing process have you seen in your career? While I have stopped counting, I’ve seen a tremendous amount of variability in the way organiaations guide sourcing professionals through the use of sourcing best practices and tools. Some examples include:

• Find, Get, Keep: A three step sourcing process I saw used at an industrial manufacturer that transformed their sourcing process from a reactive 3 bids and a buy process to proactive category management.

• 7 Step Sourcing: A.T. Kearney’s process is over 15 years old and is still used (Profile Category, Select Sourcing Strategy, Generate Supplier Portfolio, Select Implementation Path, Negotiate & Select Supplier, Integrate Suppliers and Benchmark Supply Market).

These and other sourcing processes; all serve to guide professionals to use a structured approach to how they are approaching their sourcing projects with the goal of increasing project results.

In a similar manner, applying a structured approach to change management can increase project results. Here are two approaches I recommend for your review:

• Kotter 8 Step Process for Leading Change: This one started me on my change management journey. Simple, straightforward and filled with great ideas (click here).

ADKAR: A Model for Change: One of the most influential books I have read in my career; one I have shared with many colleagues who in turn have recommended it to others. The book will help you to break down the process for how to change individual behaviors and ultimately organisational behaviours.

#1: Active & Visible SponsorshipThis best practice is the holy grail of successful change management. It has held the number one position for the last 18 years on ‘Contributors to Success over Time’ on Prosci®

benchmarking reports and it appears in every major body of change management research that I have encountered. So the question isn’t “Is it important?” but “How do I do it on my project?”

Similar to communication, active and visible project sponsorship is a broad topic as the role of the sponsor changes as we progress from project start up, to design, to implementation and ultimately into value realisation. In my experience, it is usually during the latter half of the process where projects struggle the most to keep their sponsors engaged and active, which has led me to creating the following mantra: Make Sponsorship Easy!

What does this mean?




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFqXthkBoIc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFqXthkBoIc

http://www.kotterinternational.com/the-8-step-process-for-leading-change/

https://www.prosci.com/bookstore/adkar-a-model-for-change.html?utm_source=adkar-book&utm_medium=redirect&utm_campaign=cm


• First you have to truly understand the goals of the project, how success is going to be measured and, as a project leader, you need to be inserted into the information flow that measures success.

• Next, as you look through the data you want to engineer sponsorship moments. Starting with the positive data, identify data points with suggested follow-ups. Examples:

At each point in the process we are taking ownership of the next step and making it as easy as possible. In this way we are increasing the activity level and visibility of our sponsor.

What’s Next in Project Success?As with the previous year’s reports, I have always found reading through the success factors list to be an excellent reminder of the types of practices I should be implementing on all of my projects. As I thumb through the report I’m anxious to dive into a new section titled Cultural Awareness that contains a groundbreaking collection of findings on how we should be varying our approaches to projects based upon different cultures.

If you liked this paper and want to see another one going into the cultural topic, please email me at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn. Please include a reference to this paper in your connection request.

• Similarly, we will want to go through the data to look for negative points, but with a twist:

Data Point Suggestion to Sponsor

1st RFP published • Stop by team meeting, recognise John Smith for leading the change• Forward to HR for internal employee kudos

75% of strategic suppliers on performance scorecard • Draft a letter from the sponsor to the team recognising event. Send to sponsor and ask them to forward it to the team.

Data Point Action Plan

Division A 50% behind project schedule: • Step 1: I’ve setup an information finding session with their general manager to gather more data.

• Step 2: Meeting placed on your calendar to cover results.




mailto:j.shaw%40bravosolution.com?subject=7%20Reasons%20Why%20Projects%20Succeed

https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnryanshaw


CIPS Disclaimer

The information contained in this document has been supplied to you by BravoSolution who are CIPS’s Knowledge Partner for eProcurement/eSourcing.

CIPS takes no responsibility for any loss or damage in anyway arising from your interpretation or use of this information.

To find out more about BravoSolution, please visit www.bravosolution.com.

To find out more about Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply visit www.cips.org or call +44 (0)1780 756777 or email [email protected].

CIPS, Easton House, Church Street, Easton on the Hill, Stamford, Lincolnshire, PE9 3NZ




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