By Rob Llewellyn

Whether a business provides a service or sells a product, it cannot afford to stand still while the rest of the world makes progress and continues to change.

Any business leader worth their salt should know that they need to transform their business in a variety of ways to maintain and gain market share and profit. But whilst a profitable business is good at doing what it does best, whether that is providing a service or a product, it will not necessarily have the right resources to plan, manage and deliver the successful business transformation projects and programmes that are vital for the business to change.

Within the last few years, one client that asked me to help them was the largest and most successful of its kind in Europe. It was a highly profitable business and well respected across its industry sector. For the purposes of this post, I shall refer to the business in question as “Widget-Wonder”.

The Managing Director of Widget-Wonder had wanted to change a small but critical part of their business as the competition had already made changes in that area and Widget-Wonder suddenly realised they were trailing behind and needed to play catch up.

Widget-Wonder assigned a small Widget-Wonder team of people to “do what is necessary to change the business”. Despite best efforts, when I was called in, the 4 month project was 18 months late, no change in Widget-Wonder’s business had taken place and tempers were rising between internal teams with divisional Directors falling out with one another.

All of the most basic documents found in any well managed project were missing. There was no project schedule, no project initiation document, no log of risks, issues, assumptions or dependencies, no change log, no meeting minutes, no governance and not a weekly progress report to be found anywhere. So it will come as no surprise to anyone in the business of professionally managing change, that the project was out of control and that this high-performing business was now bleeding inside as a result.

Widget-Wonder had dozens of some of the best widget makers in Europe who commanded top salaries and were highly sought after throughout their industry. But as an old colleague of mine used to say; “if I want a leg of lamb I don’t go to a hairdresser”, and these highly skilled resources lacked the knowledge and experience required to ‘manage a project’ that was intended to change a critical part of their business.

Even Widget-Wonder’s most experienced widget-maker who held a PhD. in widget making, should not have been expected to efficiently manage the project; because managing projects is not what he did as a profession.

The fault in any similar scenario sits firmly at the door of leaders who fail to recognise that business change needs to be managed by people who know the implications of making fundamental changes across a business and who know how to transform strategy into reality. After all, it is well known (amongst these who know) that strategy is tougher to deploy than develop.

Hiring a professional business transformation consultant not only optimises the likelihood of successful business change, it also allows staff to continue to focus on what they do best, as opposed to being side-tracked and expected to become overnight experts in a completely different professional arena.

Whilst Widget-Wonder did ask me to come in and recover the project (which was done quite easily) it was done 18 months late, after 18 months of spend, political fallout and ill feeling within Widget-Wonder.

About the Author

Rob Llewellyn is an independent business transformation consultant with a 27 year business career. He has provided consultant services to medium and large size organisations across Europe, the Middle East, Australia, Asia and the USA. Read Rob Llewellyn’s blog here.