My hope is your map is starting to take shape. As I mentioned earlier, that map, while it might not be ready to publish at this point, or put out into the organization, with a little bit of time and effort to get that more consistent across the organization and get three, or four or five or six more people involved in this, this becomes an incredibly important communication tool. And simply it aligns people behind the activities or the changes with the intention of the direction and the vision that we're trying to fulfill. So that's a good thing. Now, let's talk about the other side of aligning implementing change, which is the implementation challenge. Before we get too deep into this, I'd like you to consider some habits that your organization already has, do you have a standardized methodology for change or project planning, whether that's a PMI or IPM, a or any of the specific projects Management methodologies.

Do you use that? Now, there's pros and cons to this. It's not a mandatory thing. But it certainly can be helpful. And this is one area where organizations have gotten better over the years. What's the makeup of your change?

Or your project teams? Are they self selected? Are they 30 people large? Is everybody who wants to show up show up? Is it the same select few every time? Is that a cross section represented by the system?

Who is on your project teams? And at the end of the day, who is ultimately responsible for the projects or the changes success? Is it the employees? Is it the local area manager? Is it the project leader? Who is it?

Let's dig into some of these and find out when we think about implementing change, your organization will be using formally or informally some methodology. Now this is a very simple change model. There are dozens likely hundreds of those kinds of things circulating around organizations. And as you look through this, this is all very straightforward and based on common sense, determine the challenges, get some input, do an analysis of the good ideas in terms of what would happen if we did that. Make a decision, develop a plan around who's going to do what, when, and then let's implement the plan correct as we go. So that's relatively straightforward.

And yet, organizations still run into trouble. Well, let's find out where we run into trouble. There are minimally five essentials for implementing successful change. You've got to have accountability from the top, we've got to have good project teams. middle management has got to be engaged, people need to know what to do, and we need to continually learn from our experience. Now let's look at each one of those in a little bit more depth.

At the end of the day, accountability For Change must come from the top. So that's the senior level, the CEO, the executives, the executive director, the directors, whatever it is in your organization, the top of the organization has to be able to hold the whole organization accountable for the results they seek from all of the changes. They need to be able to stay on top of the changes enough to know we're making progress. They need to be in touch with the project team leaders. They need to be able to communicate along with the project team leaders to the managers and first level supervisors the information they need, accountability starts at the top and if we don't have accountability coming from the top, success is not going to show up anytime soon. Let's talk about effective project teams.

There's several dimensions here. First one is one most project teams puts down a little improvement Most project teams believe their only mandate is to develop the plan. Unfortunately, that's half their job. The other half of their job is to recognize that as long as the project team is around, they are experts on that particular project. So they need to do as much as they can for as long as they're around to help engage the system. All of those people that will be impacted by and have to help implement the change.

They have to help them increase their willingness and ability to implement the changes. Most project teams are really good at the first one, really struggle with the second one, and it is a 5050 split on this. The second is it's helpful, not mandatory, but it's certainly helpful to have an effective methodology. And this really is one place where most organizations have clearly improved over the last number of years. Do we have the right people on the project team. And to those people have access to all the necessary resources, the best way to determine if you've got the right people on the project team is, first of all, to look at the change, and superimpose that change on top of your systems map and determine all of the internal stakeholders minimally, the internal stakeholder groups that will be impacted by or will have to help implement the change in their local work area.

Do you have a representative from the major groups on the project team? It's really good idea to make sure that you've got some people on that project team who are not yet completely sold on this change because you need to get their input considered sooner rather than later. And of course, once you get the right people do they have access to all the necessary resources, the most critical resource people on project teams need his time. They need to be able to set some of their regular day job aside and focus a percentage of their time on this project, rather than doing the project work off the side of their desk. Many, many, many organizations do not provide enough time for project team members. And they wonder why there's this loud whooshing sound as project deadlines go flying past because people haven't had the time to put into the project, right people necessary resources.

Lastly, and this is something new for many project teams, they have not even thought of our project teams integrating transition details into the project plans. Now we'll talk more about leading people through transition little later in this particular workshop. But for now, the one key transition message that must be embedded in the project plan is when we launched this project at whatever date it is, can we start using this That's the time to turn this, this and this off, or that's the time this is going to end, we've got to make very clear the separation between the old way of doing things, and what the new thing will be based on this project plan. project teams have got to have that understanding, and they've got to embed that information right into the project plans. When we're talking about middle management engagement, we have to realize that at the end of the day, the middle managers are the ones who take the heavy lifting for leading all of these projects and changes out their local work area.

So it's really important that they are engaged. They're the ones who provide the communication between the project teams and the senior executives and all of their employees in their particular group or team or shift or region or whatever it might be. They're the ones who need to provide the ongoing link between strategy change and transition. Not only enterprise wide level but also at their local work area level. So it's vitally important that the senior executives, as they are holding everyone accountable for the changes have a continual ongoing, effective link with the middle managers to get them the information they need. It's equally as important for the project teams to do the same thing.

Because if you don't have the middle managers engaged, your changes aren't going to go anywhere. Lastly, the middle managers are not experts on the change. They need to get to know what this change is all about. They are experts at how work in the local work area is done. They know what's going on in their particular parts of the organization. So then they need to be able to translate the project plans into what needs to be done at their local work area.

Fourth piece is Do people know what to do? We'd like to think that this would be obvious that this would be a no brainer and people should be able to read it. Plan and figure out what to do. If you're relying on that as a way to have people change, you're in a little bit of trouble. Because you've got to make this explicit. Everybody has to have the details they need.

Individual and collective efforts must align the formal and informal rewards need to support the change. And the necessary supports need to be in place, whether that's coaching or training or learning kinds of supports. But you've got to be explicit. And this information needs to come from the middle managers, what details do they need to take that particular project plan for that particular change and make it work on the night shift? Or in the North East region? whatever it might be.

Lastly, are we learning from our experience? Are we making sure that we don't repeat mistakes from failed changes? And if we get good at this, even if we just start to pay attention to this. What we're really doing is working on that fourth challenge changing the way we change. By paying attention to the mistakes that we've made. Are we doing project or change debriefs or after action reviews the idea that came out of the US Army A number of years ago, after major implementations so that we can share the understanding around what worked and what needs to be improved the next time so we don't continue to repeat those same mistakes.

Are we continually learning from old habits? So there's lots of things to consider when it comes to implementing change? Here's a question. What are you and your colleagues going to do to improve both the alignment and the successful implementation of all the changes throughout your part of the organization or the organization as a whole? I'd like you to find this worksheet your action plan and make a few notes to yourself.