To maintain competitive advantage, organisations must change and evolve over time. The traditional approach to Supply Chain fails to get the objectives, reason why companies are investing heavily in consultants to keep local staff from knowing what to do. Resistance to an adoption of best practices maintains the status quo, as it failed to consider key issues relative to Order Management, Procurement, or Inventory Management. As a result, customer service suffers, stock prices declined, organisational and personal reputations are damaged and many careers are negatively impacted. A major transformation is quite difficult!
Which are the most common characteristics of project failure?
a) Lack of top management support.
b) Too few resources (people, time, budget).
c) Lack of project team knowledge and accountability.
d) Poor methodology and/or communication.
e) “Silo approach” (not assessing impacts across people, process, systems, and equipment).
f) Poor program management (timeline and scope ill-defined or not well managed).
g) Poor transition programs.
h) A misaligned expectation of the applications.
i) Resistance to change.
The recommended approach:
First, with an “end in mind” approach, clearly define the qualitative and quantitative success metric to which the team will be held accountable.
Next, the successful transformation has to integrate a combination of both Program and Transition Management principles into the project. Coupling this with delivery and operational readiness ensures all work streams support and are supported by another interdependent work stream, while the program intent, direction, integration, and interdependencies are fully aligned.
Program Management provides a framework for effectively leading each work streams to achieve their respective goals. And Transition Management has a goal to ensure adoption throughout the organisation. So, interdependencies across work streams are identified, leaders are assigned and held accountable to deliver, stakeholders are provided visibility to program status, and the overall program effort is integrated and synchronised. Additionally, Transition Management outlines the personal benefits the program will deliver to each stakeholder, knowing that motiving people will make or break success.
A good way to think about it is that Program Management begins with planning efforts and progress through conversion. Transition Management begins by defining the end state and moves backwards to identify the changes that need to occur to achieve that end state. A combined approach leads to a superior end result.
Large scale supply chain transformations ensure that:
1) A formal business case developed up front as the basis for all program activities.
2) “End in mind” thinking is employed from the start.
3) Interdependencies across all work streams are defined and understood.
4) The entire organisation is ready to successfully operate on day one, achieving the business case.
Tools and communication vehicles to enable success:
· Integrated master schedule (focused on work streams).
· Master calendar (focused on resource availability).
· Weekly or daily status updates reports.
· Risk assessment, issue tracking and decision logs.
· Program repository for documentation (contact lists, calendars, charters, logs, etc.)
Lastly, successful programs incorporate an on-going Quality Assurance (QA) process to help ensure that program goals are met and the original intent and business case are realised. QA generally relates to the quality associated with the solution and not the process, a process that focuses on:
· Quality of work.
· Skills and experience of the team.
· Communication tools and effectiveness.
· Value being delivered and realised.
· Trust between teams and stakeholders.
· Relationship and synchronisation between work streams.
· Commitment to success.
· Project administration.
· Risk management.
Companies realise that their projects are as much about “the humans in transition” as they are about achieving tasks. They understand that key areas of the business must be integrated and synchronised around a financial business case.
Do you have a vision to transform your supply chain? Have you written it down and considered the milestones one the way, what measures will you use to keep the transformation on track?
Dave Food