Change failures are costly, lead to loss of revenue, delayed cost reductions, delayed risk management improvements and possible missed regulatory changes that can bring the wrath of the regulators down on you.
Change failures can not only cost your business a fortune but finding out what went wrong, how to fix it and providing an accurate audit trail for regulators can also be time-consuming and stressful if you don’t have the right platform in place. A good change management platform can be the difference between your projects being a roaring success or an utter failure, increasing or killing your bottom line.
So, why do change management projects often fail? Is it down to the execution process, poor planning, rehearsal or improvement capabilities? This post will explain why change management often fails and offer tips and advice on how Cutover can help you get it right.
We’ll cover:
- Why do Change Management Projects Often Fail?
- How Can You Improve Your Change Management Success Rate?
Why do Change Management Projects Often Fail?
The success rate of change management projects isn’t the most flattering. 70% of all change management projects result in a failure, but why? The finger is often pointed towards poor execution, but insufficient planning and rehearsal are often to blame. The mistake of businesses not approaching change projects with the required amount of thought and consideration is equally to blame as errors during the execution.
Research has shown that with excellent change management, a business is more than six times more likely to meet their deadlines than those with poor change management and three times more likely than those with just fair change management.
Change management projects also often exceed their budgets. This is down to poor planning and organization, and if an event fails costs will skyrocket. Change management costs are a necessary evil but with an effective process in place, it’s easy to stay within your budget and manage your project successfully.
How Can You Improve Your Change Management Success Rate?
Release and resilience contention is a major factor in delayed or failed change. Usually change requests are only approved by Change Governance a few weeks before the event, meaning that possible conflicts with other events only come to light when your project is about to go live.
This means that change events often have to be rescheduled which increases costs, delays the expected benefits and can lead to wasted change windows.
This is why effective enterprise change management and planning are essential to getting the best value out of change projects. You can improve your current change process by using software to help with:
- Improving event scheduling and sequencing. Avoid release contention and delayed events.
- Event planning. Improve the chance of event success.
- Rehearsing and executing. Reduce the likelihood of errors that may lead to disruption and outages.
- Aiding communication and visibility. Real-time status communications and access to live dashboards give clear visibility throughout the duration of your events.
- Creating audit trails. Give clear accountability and allow you to see which part of the event went well and where it could have been improved.
Why Communication and Visibility are so Important
One of the main downfalls of traditional change management tools and processes is that it’s difficult to keep track of current status during a high-pressure event and by the time status is communicated it is often already out of date. Different teams can also find themselves working from varying outdated plans if they are not held and updated centrally in real time, causing an incongruence across the involved teams.
Everyone needs to be on the same page when it comes to change events to ensure a successful and smooth execution and phone calls, emails and SMS are not always sufficient for the level of communication needed.
Introduce the Right Platform and Communicate its Value
A lot of change management processes fail before they’ve even begun due to a lack of proper planning and execution. With the right platform, you can be sure that your planning phase will not be compromised and every base will be covered when it comes to implementing your changes.
Cutover are experts in enterprise change management and the Cutover platform will help you implement changes with reduced time, cost and risk.
Cutover enables you to collaboratively plan change events, orchestrate with real-time communications, visualize with live telemetry and provides an automatic audit trail for compliance and post-event learning. It also provides visibility into every stage of the process.
When introducing a new platform for your team to use, ensure that you effectively communicate the benefits it will bring to reduce resistance and increase adoption. For example, explain how a platform like Cutover can reduce the high level of manual work involved in change events, freeing up more time to focus on ensuring that the change is a success.
This will lead to fewer human errors, increased efficiency and better communication and collaboration. The Cutover platform helps you implement changes with greater efficiency and reduced costs. It provides automation that is not built to replace key people but to augment them with the right data to do the best job they possibly can.