How important is being a 'trusted adviser' to clients?

I was asked this a few days ago, so thought I would quickly articulate my views here.

Without trust, it seems to me that relationships are ineffective. Individuals will never achieve optimum performance and the benefits from the relationship will not achieve their full potential.

As a consultant, one strives to become a 'trusted adviser' - as a professional person a consultant strives for client satisfaction as well as personal satisfaction - in a change environment one would gauge this as benefits delivered (exceeding those required if possible) along with the behavioural and process changes that ensure that those benefits endure. As a trusted adviser the consultant is taking the client relationship to the next level - not necessarily for mercenary reasons - endeavouring to use their skills and 'wise counsel' to support their client through whatever challenges faces them.

It seems to me that this is critical to development of a long-term professional relationship, with potential benefits to the consultant of further work and referrals.

Defining change management

I wrote on 4 January about the tensions between project and change management. The Change Management Learning Center have a great (short) paper aimed at giving a definition of change management.

Managing the financial impacts of change

I've had a few discussions lately about financial control in a change and project environment. Too much to discuss in detail here, but here's a 'top of my head' list of the things that you might do to keep financial control of your project;

• Build a narrative business case, and detailed plan;
• Align that to detailed numbers - implementation (revenue) expenses, capital expenses phased to show cashflow (cash is king!), and benefits case - what will be delivered when and what will the real impacts be;
• Develop a risk weighted NPV - use factors such as 'do we know how to do this?', 'do we have the resources?', 'budget?' to show an NPV - over time improve the NPV by adjusting the risk factors as you satisfy yourself that you can achieve it. The NPV (or ROCE) is a great measure to show expected financial outcomes.
• use qualitative measures to support your numbers (which of course you will monitor in detail weekly/monthly!) - are deliverables being completed or is there a bow-wave of activity building up with consequent cashflow impact, are the numbers and criticality of open issues/risks increasing etc
• Use graphs to compare measures - see the relatives as well as the absolutes.
• Make sure any numbers that you use are reconciled to source data (ie; are accurate), and preferably 'triangulated' to two sources

With proper (basic) systems and processes, much of this monitoring can be automated!

Enough for now!

Why do we deliver change...to create value

We deliver change to create value - that's it. I've written on this subject before but given one or two discussions I've had recently thought it worth reiterating the point.

Change is a difficult thing. But it must always have an ultimate goal - in corporate life we deliver change because it creates shareholder value (it is difficult to see any other reason), and in the social and governmental sectors we might go through a change programme to establish some social or environmental improvement. Why would you go through potentially gut-wrenching change for no good reason?

Facilitation for change - tools to support us through change

I've been along to a meeting today - these folks are all professional facilitators based in central England, and much of what they do is help groups of people achieve their change goals (as well as mediation, public policy and loads of other things). It is a long time since we could rely on things to 'just happen', and facilitated workshops, conferences, meetings etc help in ensuring that objectives are achieved.

This got me thinking - as change consultants/change managers what do we have in our armoury to help us through some really tricky people-related change activities. Here's my list off the top of my head...

• processes to support change analysis
• project and programme management approaches
• Communications expertise; and
• Professional facilitation of course

....but other than experience and common sense probably not a lot else.

If you want to get in contact with any of the UK Facilitators let me know.

Project Management and Change Management

There is a debate going on in another forum about the use of structured project management methodologies (eg; Prince 2) versus the management of change. We need to be clear that project management is not the same as change management - managing the project is part of managing the change, but it is a relatively mechanistic process, providing the assurance of technical delivery and to some extent the delivery of the benefits. Change management is about delivering the behavioural change that ensures that the benefits endure, that the technical changes are accepted, and that the expected outcomes are achieved.

Another way of looking at this is that there are many more people involved in delivering the change (the sponsor, Board, managers etc), whereas the project processes can be delivered by the Project Manager (who, if they are enlightened/experienced will be focussed on delivering the change as well as the technical delivery).

One thing that annoys me is where some third party suppliers/partners (in IT particularly) tend to come along after winning a contract and expect that they can simply implement their bit of technology and it will work and be accepted - they often get a shock and then cost overruns etc, and consequently relationships start to fail between supplier and customer....the real world is difficult!

Here's a link to a basic project/change role comparison from the change management learning center if you're interested.

Change training and development

I was asked today about change training and development.

I know there are a few public courses around, but in my view bespoke training related to a particular business sector is most helpful - different sectors tend to have different challenges, ways of operating, language etc, and all of these things are important in how people act and react to change. Probably the best course that I've run is a focussed 'advanced' training within the Financial Services sector, based on 'real-life' case studies and a little bit of role playing. This allowed participants to establish an approach to managing through change (at a very high-level inevitably) in a safe environment - and its loads of fun too!

If training can be supported by mentoring, so much the better.

The real world

I received the joke below in an email today - one of those things that go around at Christmas time. You can read the joke if you wish, but the sense of it is that the real world has changed so much that saying 'Happy Christmas' might upset someone. This is political correctness gone mad in my opinion, although there was an article in a national paper a few days ago that said managers are fearful of putting decorations up. Amazing. At the other extreme there are offices where you might see decorations for Diwali, Chinese New Year etc as well as Christmas of course, recognising a social and community approach to life.

The key point here for me is that in our professional lives we are impacted by whatever is happening in the real world, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the substance of an event or activity and the interpretation of the same. Any action will mean different things to different people, and will impact them in a variety of ways. We are all different, and will vary our mood and interpretation on different days. This is key in change management and transformation of business.

THE JOKE

I wanted to send out some sort of holiday greeting to my friends, but it
is so difficult in today's world to know exactly what to say without
offending someone. So I met with my lawyer yesterday, and on his advice
I wish to say the following:-

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes
for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress,
non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the winter solstice
holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious
persuasions or secular practices of your choice with respect for the
religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their
choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.
I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and
medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally
accepted calendar year 2007, but not without due respect for the
calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society
have helped make the world a great place (not to imply that any country
is necessarily greater than any other country) and without regard to the
race, creed, colour, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual
preference of the wishee.

By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms:
This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely
transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no
promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for
her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law, and is
revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted
to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for
a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday
greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement
of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the
wisher.

Disclaimer: no trees were harmed in the sending of this message however,
a significant number of electrons were slightly inconvenienced.

Cleaning out my sock drawer - let's be analytical

Ok, I haven't really been cleaning out my sock drawer - I'm not desperate for things to do! What I have been doing for the last hour was going through all of the masses of forms, analyses etc that I maintain in a folder on my laptop and making sure that they are all still relevant and useful. This is probably equivalent to folding socks, but it needed doing.

The point of course is that managing change (as for the remainder of project management-related activity) is an analytical process, that needs planning, monitoring and measuring just like any other activity. I know that is all about people, and people are fickle, have egos and desires, but whatever we do to address the needs of these people must be planned to ensure that we know what we need to do and when (and how much it will cost my accounting conscience annoyingly reminds me), and monitor and assess the success of our actions and then replan and so on.

The challenge of course is that monitoring is difficult -if we ask someone "How are you?", they will normally say "Fine!" rather than "My leg hurts and this new system will be rubbish!". But that is what makes it interesting...

If you need a document or process around any aspect of change management, please email me

Work/Life Balance - is it sustainable in the real world

My wife is retiring at Christmas aged forty-something. It is not that we're rich (we're not!), but work and life don't balance with a couple of young kids and a house and me to organise (I do my best...). Now she's working out what to do with her time!

In all of our professional lives, 10 hour days are the norm for many, and if you commute into a big city, you can probably add a two or three hours to that - leave home at 6.30am and get home at 7:30pm if you're lucky - I've been doing it a lot this year.

Why do we work so many hours?;

• because it is expected
• because everyone else is doing it
• because it is professionally necessary
• because we love work
• because we need the money
• because if we don't do it, then they'll find someone else
• because everyone else over-commits and we don't want to under-deliver

I'm sure there are more reasons that I could think of.

Today's business environment is getting faster and ever-more pressured, with results expected immediately, instant messaging, email, mobile phones etc (see other postings). It is all of these things that perpetuate the need for longer working hours, and less of a life. Let's get real and assess what is critical and not just important - there are critical things in our working lives that must be done, and surely our balanced home life is critical? This is a real world issue - how can people have a life and work, rather than work and a life. Should we talk about life/work balance?

Many large organisations have addressed this issue to some extent or other with flexible working arrangements, career breaks and suchlike - the recognition that people work to live, rather than live to work. You are a long-time dead.