In talking with a customer the other day, the conversation turned to the health and success of her initiatives, specifically, the critical nature of one major current initiative. This initiative has tremendous exposure within the organization (as in, job security is directly connected to success), is in the hundreds of millions of dollars invested, and has a significant expected payback in a fairly short period of time. Sound familiar?
What is keeping this customer up at night (and many of her team members) is how to ensure initiative success. The discussion turned to metrics, transparency and how to get clean lines of sight into the initiative’s health, and she remarked that they have gotten some good feedback from team members, front line performers and managers, some lukewarm feedback, some very cold feedback, and some folks who have taken a “wait and see” stance. Truly, not an ideal position to be in with regards to knowing how the initiative is progressing – especially keeping in mind that there are new areas of the business and parts of the project that are being rolled out right on the heels of the first phase. Often, we hear clients say that they have some dashboards set up to monitor parts of the business – sales, financials, operations, but rarely do we hear/see clients who have dashboards intimately tied to monitoring the health of the initiative. So, while the general business dashboards may indicate that everything in the business is progressing “ok” (think patient health), there is no way for the organization or project team to know that the initiative is in critical care stages (imagine if nurses and physicians had no monitors or charts showing the up to date vital signs of patient health!).
Our discussion quickly turned to the importance of tying the intent of the initiative and the defined outcomes of success, back to the project/initiative, connecting both leading and lagging indicators of initiative health and success, and connecting that with a diagnostic approach to periodically assess and evaluate the state of the initiative. What was interesting, and refreshing, was her perspective that our client was able to keep pride of ownership/ego aside, and really focus on the diagnostic providing objective and crucial insight into the factors that could ensure the delivery of the project’s success (more likely delivering the needed ROI in the desired time frame).
So, I ask you to consider: With your current initiatives, is everything ok? (and how do you know???) Please share your stories on ways you and/or your team have measured initiative health and success. We’d love to learn from you.
Cheers,
Andrew
