Can pace and quality really co-exist?

...Yes!

Actually achieving it isn’t simple though and comes with extensive experience. The real answer is that it depends, mostly on how you set up your programme at the start, but also on a few other key factors.

Preparation

As with most things in life, the more effort that goes into your planning in the early stages the better chance of that plan succeeding. A late family friend was renowned for regularly saying “preparation comes before the event” and this is especially true for any sort of digital or business transformation. The better the quality of your input will directly contribute to the quality of your output.

Enterprise Architecture and Business Analysis are two essential skillsets in the early work of transformation and when rushed or not done properly, it will almost certainly hurt later in the programme when delays and poor-quality outcomes become a regular topic of conversation. Sadly, this happens all too often in the tech world when organisations and leaders don’t invest enough time or resource in the early stages of a programme.

In simple terms, transforming a large-scale business with multiple legacy systems is just like renovating an old eight storey 19th century cotton mill, you have an idea of what it’s going to take when you start out but you can’t be 100% certain of what you’ll find when you start ripping down walls, opening up cavities or replacing pipework and there’s often more than a few surprises!

Whilst it can often be seen as an unnecessary and costly overhead, the more effort you put in up front on due diligence will give you a much clearer view of time and costs to complete the programme. This can still be a timebound piece of work and it’s often known as a ‘discovery’ phase in the early stages of a programme. The discovery phase may also include the initial design phase which helps provide clarity and certainty before final business and financial commitments are made to the wider transformation programme.

Deadlines

Setting deadlines and targets is helpful for leaders that need to provide updates to senior stakeholders, often Executive Boards and CFO’s. This is especially helpful for tracking and managing any financial benefits linked to the programme, where the benefits and opportunities are ‘baked into’ the company’s financial plans.

The challenge comes when senior managers start to communicate high level plans and timescales to their leaders, which aren’t substantiated and are built on multiple layers of assumptions and, frankly, guess work. The whole programme then turns into crisis management, if not immediately, then as soon as the realisation sets in that the initial high-level plans were built on a ‘happy path’ and a lack of detail or true detailed knowledge.

Rushing to meet a pre-determined deadline that was set in stone early on for each stage of a programme will lead to someone, somewhere, cutting corners and driving poor-quality outcomes and can mean an overall greater delay in the wider programme. Setting deadlines is important, it’s part of effective planning and execution, but plans need to be reviewed regularly to make sure they are still achievable. Doing so on a periodic basis will be good discipline and will enable any key decisions to be made about time, cost or scope.

Ways of working

An essential aspect of delivering a transformation programme is to maintain alignment across teams, outcomes, dependencies, and deliverables. This is hard enough when you have all teams and suppliers following a standard way of working, but when you have teams following different methods of delivery then the risk increases significantly.

In an environment that has both traditional and agile delivery methods, teams can suddenly and unknowingly start to work in different or competing directions and suddenly you have your teams / squads / tribes working to different outcomes with gaps and/or overlaps appearing in scope. With separate planning and retrospective reviews taking place weekly, bi-weekly or some other frequency and where teams are fully autonomous, how can you be sure that all teams are pulling in the same direction.

When teams are following different ways of working, or even when they are not, it’s essential to have regular programme wide reviews to maintain close alignment, check in on each others progress, share any horror stories and help all teams to improve by sharing what has been learned. Trust, or lack of, between teams can make or break a programme and so an essential role of leadership is to build strong bonds between staff members and teams.

Potential obstacles

There are many hurdles that you are likely to encounter on the journey that can delay the programme timescales, such as:

Distractions - day to day ‘business as usual’ work that pulls on the time of those that are meant to be delivering the future.

Imbalance in accountabilities – not having the right balance across internal and external teams can increase risk against the programme, e.g., asking too much of suppliers and not enough ’skin in the game’ internally or people acting on your behalf.

Stakeholder communications – inconsistent and flaky communications can breed a lack of confidence, be sure to provide regular, timely and transparent updates to sponsors and senior stakeholders. Transparency must involve sharing all news, not just the good news!

Imposters - People playing out of position or playing a role they don’t have the knowledge or experience for, especially in suppliers where they may bring a square peg to a round hole. If for some reason this is necessary, track it as a risk and provide as much support as possible rather than waiting for them to fail.

Dictators – Senior Leaders that are too controlling, set unreasonable expectations, make commitments to their executives without foundation and don’t listen to their teams. All too often leading to poorly motivated teams and a systemic failure to deliver.

Simple Steps to Success

Pace, just as beauty, is a perception in the eye of the beholder. However, for any delivery or transformation work the true definition of pace is inherently linked to the complexity of the work and it's important that's both understood and communicated from the start. For large programmes, you can never guarantee success or hitting milestones without acknowledging the need to prioritise certain outcomes, make sacrifices and/or compromise on scope or quality.

Some of those sacrifices might be acceptable, others won’t be and so whilst you can’t guarantee success, there are steps that you can put in place from the beginning to help:

Assign dedicated, full time business experts on to the programme who know the business but also are invested in the vision for the future of the business.
Avoid as many unknowns as possible – run a discovery phase to capture as much information up front about your existing landscape as you can to reduce late surprises
Communicate well and regularly - be clear on the desired business outcomes and make sure everyone is bought into the benefits of the programme - at all levels within the programme but also communicate as much as possible outwardly too.
Constant, active and accurate communication between all stakeholder, suppliers, sponsors to maintain alignment on priorities and outcomes.
Regularly validate that you still have the right team for the programme. As the programme progresses, you may need to rebalance the skills and roles involved.
Regularly review alignment across teams, squads, tribes and involve suppliers in the process.

Xandr Consulting can support you at any stage of your journey, whether you're at the start and need help developing your plans or if you need support with your in-flight programme to help either keep it on track or build a turnaround plan. Please get in touch today and we'll be happy to help!