There is a view of a typical transformation journey, a buzz and excitement around the start, investment and energy poured into the project, and leadership employing hands-on guidance to achieve your North Star. But then what?
Most organisations invest heavily, with time, resources, and people power dedicated to lighting the match at the start of the transformation, but few consider the challenge of what happens after the change is considered ‘done’.
Transformation success and sustainability hinges not just on this initial launch power, but on longevity. Which is where continuity planning is vital.
The Forgotten Phase
There is a common misconception that a transformation must have a finality to it. An ‘end’. While it is true that without a goal to achieve, or a strategy to support your activities, a transformation would lack direction and guidance; The counter argument is that transformation can also be viewed as continual, and so doesn’t have an end point where we can wash our hands and consider it ‘done’.
There are two ways in which a completist focus can impact transformations, one with an inconsistent support and energy a transformation can often falter in the middle, but also when the goal is complete, they can fail to sustain impact or incorporation when returning to business as usual. Transformation doesn’t end when the programme draws to a close. That’s when the next stage begins.
Continuity Planning
Within the context of transformation, continuity planning is a key pillar that focuses on ‘what next?’. When the transformation is considered complete, whether you have devoted internal resources, or partnered with an expert, who is going to maintain the change, embed the new ways of working, or prevent regression?
Ensuring that this is captured early in the transformation, prevents loss of momentum, stalled transformations and wasted resource. If a project goes dark as soon as it is marked as complete, how much impact will it actually have?
Continuity planning could be as simple as highlighting ownership, if the transformation is small and has a minimal impact, identifying who is responsible for the continuation. With larger or more invasive projects, this could involve skills and capability building, new hires, or long-term metrics that are viewed on an enterprise scale, to ensure that nothing is lost.
Risks of Ignoring the Future State
We understand that creating time to capture the start of a transformation is difficult, and the additional effort required to identify and plan for the end of the transformation is an additional layer of responsibility and decision making, however the risks of ignoring this future state of your transformation could be detrimental.
These include:
Cultural backslide: With no ownership, individuals could revert to ways of working and ignoring the new tool or process and sliding back into “the way we did things before”. This wastes time and resources and means the transformation itself was ineffective.
Loss of institutional knowledge: If knowledge transfer is not accounted for and intentional, critical insights, skill and the reasons behind decisions can be lost. This is particularly the case when external partners roll off or internal champions leave a project.
Change fatigue: Engaging your team effectively during a transformation builds awareness and desire, but this is wasted if a “big bang” is followed by silence. With no sustained message or support, trust can decline, and future initiatives can suffer.
Abandoned metrics: Performance indicators that are introduced during transformations can often be left behind or disconnected from ongoing reporting if not accounted for. For example, monitoring adoption vs monitoring usage long term, time-savings from process improvements or tooling, reassessing those down the line to ensure people are still engaging in the way we expect. This risks a lack of accountability and incentivisation, meaning less focus from the individuals in your team.
When continuity is neglected, transformation outcomes degrade. Planning for what happens after the change is just as vital as the steps included in the change itself.
How To Plan for The End
Designing for durability as part of the planning for change will alleviate these risks. The key ingredients for a strong continuity plan include:
Clear post-project ownership.
Capability transfer such as a comprehensive training support handover, or operating model realignment in the form of onboarding new teams equipped to manage the new processes moving forward
Governance structures and KPI’s that will remain in place and be monitored and managed as part of BAU.
Regular review and realignment mechanisms.
These form part of a continuity plan and alleviate the mess and loss of traction that can occur when considering them too late. They require early input from various parts of an organisation from HR processes to performance systems through to leadership’s key role in sustaining a change narrative.
An organisation that considers transformation as an evolving lifecycle, instead of a project, are more likely to embed the change effectively and sustain it effectively.
Don’t Let Your Investment Fade
Continuity planning in transformations isn’t an optional, it’s strategy. We’ve seen evidence of this time and time again, where organisations that plan what comes after a transformation gain long-term advantage and are significantly more likely to embed sustained change.
At Lean Tree our experts are available to audit your transformations efforts, we can help you identify the need and plan for transition periods. Get in touch today to find out how we can help.
