Winning Hearts and Minds
Organisations, both public and private, are making increasingly significant, high profile and complex investments involving the acquisition, creation, or enhancement of assets that provide capabilities, which, properly managed and utilised, have the potential to create and sustain business value. Yet, in all too many cases, these investments fail to fully realise their expected benefits.
Most organisations continue to believe that all they have to do is create the capability and benefits will automatically flow. If value is to be created and sustained, benefits need to be actively managed through the whole investment lifecycle. From describing & selecting the investment, through programme scoping and design, delivery of the programme to create the capability and execution of the business changes required to utilise that capability, and the operation and eventual retirement of the resulting assets.
This requires an effective approach to governance that promotes and supports a culture of value, such that the organisation has:
- A shared understanding what constitutes value for the organisation;
- Clearly defined roles, responsibilities and accountabilities;
- Processes and practices around value management, with active benefits and change management; and
- Relevant metrics.
The core of any investment designed to deliver benefits is delivering organisational and people change. Unfortunately, our understanding of how to manage change has not kept pace with the rate of change.
Many organisations have experienced change programmes that were unsuccessful - the underlying cause often being the failure to persuade groups and individuals to change their behaviour.
Moving from a delivery centric culture to one that is value centric is a business imperative, one which is itself a major change programme that will take time to plan and implement, and also for the benefits to be achieved. It is time to move beyond words and place an emphasis on action. This will require strong leadership, and engagement and involvement at every level of the organisation.