Many of us work in organisations that put responsibility for delivering change into a group of business analysts, project managers and change specialists. We hire good people, train them, heck - we may even give them some tools. But in many cases – that is it. 

Do you have a change delivery team? Are you being looked at for why ‘your’ change performance has dropped off since the energy surge at the start of the pandemic OR has your organisation become so agile it is chaotic? Are ‘initiatives’ popping up all over the place and sucking the life out of you? Is everyone staring at you to sort your life out and get on top of change again? 

I hear this sort of thing a lot. Not just in change but in PMOs, product teams, and even in programmes. 

The capability some of us provide is expected to be provided out of the wits we possess, and the influence we can make ourselves. Many organisations only want to look at you for your fixes of their problems. But the real problem is – the answer lies beyond you – in areas you can’t reach, or areas that don’t want to engage. Your wider ecosystem. 

For example – how can you deliver the right changes if the path from strategy to business plan to project is non-existent? What if there is no change portfolio to enable priorities to be set? What if your organisation has no way of recording internal or external expense on change? Perhaps your customer business units have ineffective sponsors, no accountability or resource for business change and adoption? What if you have no benefit realisation / measurement scenario? What if you are working on a change that no longer has any priority – but you don’t know that yet? 

Quite frankly – looking at just your change delivery function is not going to fix change on its own. 

So what can you do? You’ll be expected to look into yourself, obviously. But maybe you can evaluate the organisation against a model which will expose the gaps that are making your existence almost futile? Maybe we can lift our heads up and get the organisation to realise that change delivery is not just about setting up a bunch of people you can lob those hot potatoes over to? 

Find out more about change and the BIG Maturity model