With studies suggesting 70% of transformation projects do not succeed, this is a subject which creates a lot of debate.
While no one factor can be held up as the comprehensive reason for these initiatives to collapse, some elements appear often enough to be considered as indicators of likely failure. Lack of leadership, budget, vision or a combination of all three are often cited, along with engagement, clarity and incorrect choices of technology for adoption.
Being aware of these potential pitfalls and mitigating them can be useful when planning for large scale transformative operations, and help further reduce the risk of failure, and one of best ways to put this into practice can be to use incrementalism.
Big Bang projects are so called for a reason, the emphasis for those involved in implementing them often being on the BANG. No matter how much preparation goes into it, at some point you have to ‘pull the lever’ and hope you have anticipated all the worst things that could happen, and that the team is capable enough to deal with the rest in a timely manner.
Days and weeks can be lost to planning, rehearsing and documenting a single set of actions, rather than focusing on the benefits of the changes you are making.
Some Big Bangs are unavoidable; but many can be reduced to their absolute minimum with careful planning and forethought. Working with a company which evangelises incremental change can be a big step towards that aim.
The benefits of incrementalism reach much further than simply avoiding large inflection points – you can demonstrate value much earlier, increasing stakeholder engagement and buy-in. Communication to your business can be simpler and much more dynamic. Changes in direction and reversing of decisions has a lot less impact and makes your company (yes, I’m going to use the word) a lot more agile. And your teams feel more empowered, engaged and energetic, ultimately increasing their productivity.
At Counter, we don’t just encourage incremental changes in our project work, it is baked into our business model and practices at every level. The whole company is involved in the decision-making process with regular discussions and updates, using Agile methodologies and ceremonies across our technical and business teams, without being militant about following Scrum practices or married to Jira ticket creation.
It’s not process for process’s sake – it’s about enabling our team to work efficiently and effectively towards a shared vision, and creating feedback loops that allow us to make quick decisions and change tack if necessary. And we take that approach with clients too – we don’t impose our process on the project, we work with you to decide what best suits the project and your business, not templating our work to suit our needs.
When Counter engages with a client, we look to see how we can use that mindset to apply to the challenges we have been asked to help solve. Our teams aim to mitigate risk through small, easily reversible changes which show progress and deliver value quickly, both within the project and with upskilling our associates so they can reach their full potential within your organisation as quickly as possible. We can help create a roadmap for iterative transition that can break larger, daunting transformation projects into smaller, lower risk and manageable steps.
And this is change that sticks: our clients have the option to retain the associates as full-time employees and keep all the knowledge and skills they have retained during the course of the engagement, saving recruitment costs and helping grow your business. Because they have been immersed in your business practices from the start they are already onboarded, settled in and productive.
When there is no other option, we will manage Big Bangs and work with clients to make sure the blast radius is as small as possible, using our previous experiences of such projects to provide insight and minimise risk along with analysis after the fact so we can all learn from the process.
I passionately believe in transformation projects but if consultancies are to truly help plan, manage and deliver meaningful change from inception to realisation then they must have incrementalism and collaboration in their very DNA. Otherwise, you may well find yourself on the road to failure.