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Change management excellence is key when developing service business
It is difficult to move many service units towards a common way of working, to best practices. Units are very different, some are mature while others are bare bone, some are large while others small. Units can have different culture, different leadership. Even so best practices need to be adopted to explore synergies and leverage your size.
This is challenging and everyone with experience from large implementation projects has experienced failures. Implementation is often the limiting factor when wanting to develop service business. Finding a better method means quicker results. There are four different ways of implementation in large matrix organisations and many companies choose the wrong alternative.
The opportunity
Implementing behavioural changes to front line service units has a financial impact. If the implementation is delayed or does not impact all units, it will immediately have a direct financial impact.
Change is normal in a large, developing service business. It is essential that the change methodology — we call it the “implementation machine” — is efficient for it to have optimal financial impact, fewer allocated implementation resources and minimal frustration for the organisation.
Our “implementation machine” can implement different initiatives in parallel instead of in serial and in all service units at the same time, resulting reducing lead times significantly.
This does not just deliver positive financial results faster but also increases leadership index, improves satisfaction and, if people are engaged and empowered, increases customer satisfaction.
Challenges driving change
We have managed and seen many examples of large change projects aimed at rolling out new service management systems, new service portfolios, mobile platforms, new centralized ways of taking customer calls and new ways of automatically dispatching technicians. Most of these projects faced major problems. The organisation gets upset, change is not achieved, the whole roll out takes way too long and some units never adopt to the new format. Sound familiar? We have all experienced it.
So why do we face these problems? The main reasons for a company-wide change initiative to fail are:
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Front line people are not motivated to change; they think that the change will make the situation worse instead of better, they don’t understand the argument for the change, they see risks in changing. - The front line perceives that HQ is imposing a change without understanding local conditions.
- There is not enough support from HQ to local management to drive the change.
- Responsibility for the change is not clear.
- Progress reporting is not consistent and transparent.
- Many parallel HQ change initiatives are pushed to the front line units without coordination.
- The imposed change is too big for the front line unit.
- The change is seen as a training, not a behaviour change (change management).
There are 4 different methods of driving change in service units, and we have observed that the most effective ones are least used. This is partly because they are not known and partly because they require more preparation before the change can start.
Our recommendation is: Ensure that you use the best way of implementing changes in your service organisation by designing your own implementation machine and using it for every new change in the future. This can save you a lot of money, organisational frustration and provide much better results, much faster. Use your next implementation initiative to establish and refine your implementation machine.
Use our experience when driving change
We have been developing service businesses all our lives. Service business development is our core competence. If you can’t drive change in all units, you can’t develop your service business.
We have managed many company-wide changes and we have learnt from our mistakes the hard way. Now, we have captured our experience in methods complemented by knowledge from P3M3 and the CMMI Institute.
We are proud to say that we can support you in setting up your implementation machine, which you can use many, many times. Our verified method is unique because it specifically focuses on driving change in a large, matrix service organisation.
If you want to drive a company-wide change in a specific area, we can guarantee a much faster, more successful goal fulfilment that is paid for with a fraction of achieved results,
… or if you want to manage the change yourself, we will happily share our knowledge and support you in a specific area to make you more successful.
We will find the optimal mix of your in-house expertise and our expertise in service change management.
Risks
If you fail in your implementation, the organisation will be frustrated, resources will be locked up, the change initiative budget will be over run, no financial improvement will be achieved and most devastating – customers may become dissatisfied.