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Posts tagged ‘Change management’

Aug 23

Guidance to completing a business case…and delivering the results in a compelling way

The Top-Down Approach

Image by Sanctu via Flickr

It is ultimately difficult to be a top-notch consultant unless you can build a case for your recommendations. That is, a business case. While we in no way expect every management consultant to have stellar business case and finance skills, we think that it is important you understand how to present numbers in a coherent and stimulating way.

Today’s blog does not address the technical side of financial analyses. That’s for another day. This blog gives you an understanding, albeit a brief one, of what happens in the lives of management consultants who specialise in business case development. Yet understanding their analysis approach is not enough. Great analyses with mediocre storytelling skills will lead to utter and complete project failure.

Never ever forget this; a great business case comes down to the management consultant’s ability to present the analyses in the most compelling style. A style which makes the case for change, jumps off the page, and seems alive and real to the audience. This document is a fantastic example and guide on producing such spellbinding business case presentations. We strongly recommend you read this.

To add some flavour to the context within which business case presentations are done, here are our Top 20 observations of the business case process.

  1. Yes, business case management consultants tend to work longer hours than those focused on the delivery side or change management
  2. But work comes in waves with the updates:
    1. Typically 8.30–19.00 most of the time but 8.30–22.00 before each major client update
    2. There are two reasons for this: progress needs to be demonstrated and the numbers must be perfect or the wrong number will stick in the clients mind
    3. A lot of work is done, very quickly, and always delivered to deadlines . . .
    4. . . . but the need to take the client with you limits the number of hours
    5. You have to work as real teams—more flexible, closer knit, more fun:
      1. You cannot divide the work into neat chunks
    6. The horror stories of working till midnight four nights a week are exaggerated and come from poorly managed business case projects:
      1. Are exaggerated
      2. Are usually poor/not proper business cases (the process has got lost)
    7. The framework of the process is rigid, and needs to be:
      1. A set of contractual deliverables is required in a tight time-frame
      2. Pace is one of the key things you are trying to demonstrate to the client
    8. The structured approach and tools also provide protection for consultants with low levels of industry/issue content knowledge:
      1. e.g. Focus interviews are as much about the management consultant learning jargon/issues/politics in a safe manner as they are about clients having a chance to have their say at the start
    9. Within the basic framework, every project is tailored for the client and subject to continuous change:
      1. No two business case analyses are the same from an issues, scope, content, and diagnostics point of view

10.  Business case consultants are given a set of deliverables per update, rather than tasks:

  1. They can create/have input into these if they are proactive and understand the process

11.  The real creativity is in defining issues, solving problems, and devising a compelling story to carry the message:

  1. The business case process means you do not have to invest time reinventing the approach each time, so you can get straight down to the issues
  2. The numbers in the business case analyses mean little by themselves. They need to be tied together in a story which is compelling. This takes time.

12.  More important than anywhere else to be hypothesis-led:

  1. The whole business case is organised around an evolving message plan (hypothesised messages/beliefs about change that you want to embed throughout the organisation)
  2. Everything else flows from this and back to it

13.  Time is the most valuable resource—try to spend it with maximum impact:

  1. No work is done unless the team knows what the output will be and how it will be used with clients

14.  You need to know when enough is enough!

  1. Time preaching to the converted is time wasted
  2. Not 80/20; 60/40 is often more than enough, although occasionally you need 90/10 or more

15.  The people elements are at least as important as the content (often more):

  1. A piece of analysis is only robust once a sufficiently large proportion of the key employees buy-in to its conclusions:
  2. Until then it is just an interesting set of data-driven assertions

16.  “Oh data, you wanted me to get data!”

  1. Lots of war stories but NO DATA

17.   “There is no data”

  1. Sadly too often this means ‘does not know what data looks like or is too lazy to roll his / her sleeves up and plough through reams and reams of paper to get at the data’

18.  Stating the ‘bleeding obvious’

  1. “Increasing margins will improve profits”
  2. Clients are looking for the ‘So-What’s’ – keep on digging until you find it

19.  Finding a gold mine and quantifying the value of the shack built on it

  1. Too often management consultants get down in the detail and forget the bigger picture

20.  “Validate, validate, validate – oh, does that mean I should have validated my analysis”

  1. People are validation averse because they don’t understand the process or are afraid it will be abused

Team Lillilooloo

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Aug 23

Change Management…managing it, implementation of new projects and gaining buy-in to new ideas

Change Management: Story War

Image by daveelf via Flickr

 

 How often have you experienced this? You arrived at a client, you have a great (some, like you, would say brilliant) analyses which indicates how the client can annihilate the competition by implementation a set of business actions. The client loves it and requests you showcase your plan to the project team.    

You present.    

They watch.    

You wait.    

They mumble.    

 You are surprised.    

 They leave.    

Nothing happens!    

This is not uncommon. In fact, this is one of the most common problems in consulting. Consultants simply expect clients to understand the analyses (whether it is presented in the appropriate manner and makes sense is the topic of another blog, but for now we will assume it does make sense) and implement the recommendations. This rarely ever happens. The reasons are numerous, far too numerous to list here. Rather than looking for a list of reasons, it is better to develop an approach to making clients comfortable, drawing out their objections and dealing with them.    

In today’s blog we highlight some good presentations and reports which cover change management. Below are our top 11 hints for managing change:    

  1. Change management is not about fancy analyses, charts and meetings. It is about getting people to accept your recommendations and implement your recommendations. Anything else is failure. Clients are aware of consultants who crunch tons of data, present the analyses and leave the change process to the employee. Don’t be one of them. If you cannot conduct proper change management, bring in someone who can.
  2. Change management is NOT about only getting people to accept your recommendations. It is also about understanding the merits of their objections and trying to determine how your recommendations and the client’s needs must adapt to reach the optimal result.
  3. People may not want to change for totally irrational decisions which have nothing to do with business. You need to be prepared for this and prepared to deal with this. This presentation provides a great overarching perspective on change management.
  4. People go through a well conceived and well researched emotional cycle of change. The better you understand this and the more you prepare, the better it will be for you.
  5. Dealing with resistance is just one part of the process of change management. You cannot deal with resistance by eliminating all people who oppose you. Then you will have no employees with whom to work. You have to show the client that resistance happens in all companies and increased resistance is not always the sign of a bad idea. It is just a sign of human emotional inertia.
  6. Helping employees and the project team through this process is one whereby you need to coach and guide them. Clearly if they are not assessing the idea on its business merits alone then they need to be guided to think in this way. This is a major flaw of most change processes. There is too little coaching and guidance.
  7. Place resistance to change in context. It has always existed and will always exist. Do not take it personally
  8. Ensure you have visible, direct and accessible board level support. You cannot drive change in an organisation. Only the organisation can do this and only through the leadership group.
  9. Understand the limits of the change you are trying to drive. Only drive ENOUGH change to implement the business case changes you have highlighted for success. It is rarely the case where employees need “new” personalities and values to implement a divisional or sub-divisional change.

10.  Change is not about brilliant reports. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge someone. There is no blueprint and each company is different.    

11.  Do not think you can do everything. If you did the analyses requiring the change in the business, then you may have been “tarred” and employees may resent you and brush off your efforts for no reason other than you having done the initial analyses. Therefore you may need to bring in someone who understands change management.    

We have listed only 4 of the change management documents on the site. There are probably hundreds more which may be more useful to you. Happy hunting!    

Team Lillilooloo    

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