In the world of Business Change, the first step to success is making sure your stakeholders recognize the need for and the benefits of including BC in their project deliveries. This, with a good resource, should be easy – business change is often the difference between success and failure in all manner of projects and programmes, as the human focus and effective implementation it provides can bring a delivery to fruition.
Smart leaders will recognize this, see the benefits and bring in resource accordingly. But what if there are limited BC subject matter experts available? What if external resource is not an option?
We encountered this issue/success with one of our clients. Following several highly effective deliveries from our BC experts, the senior leadership team and programme managers were all keen to include business change resource from the beginning of their projects through to the end. However, with limited resource available, how do you enable the customer to meet the demands?
In this particular customer environment, most of their smaller projects only required key BC activities and support. There was also a desire to upskill their staff and expose them to other areas of the business, increasing their capability and flexibility.
Our solution – Business Change Bootcamp. We have developed a suite of task specific, hands-on training modules designed to train staff from all backgrounds in the most used (and useful) skills and tools of business change. Designed to run in 8 1-hour remote sessions for up to 15 people, these packs are accessible, easy-to-follow and give detailed examples for trainees to experience each skill set and be ready to use them in the real world. By focusing on how to deliver rather than the heavy methodologies and techniques large (expensive)courses offer, these modules provide step-by-step processes, examples and reusable templates.
Core skills include: Stakeholder Mapping and Management, As Is/To Be Analysis, Impact Analysis, creating a Business Change Approach and Plan, Communications Planning and Delivery, Change Networks, Benefits Management, Training Planning and Delivery.
By keeping the training sessions short and remote, managers were able to commit their resources to the training with minimal impact to their work while gaining new capabilities in their team. Flexible delivery in bitesize chunks meant that the trainees absorbed the material exceptionally well, and often used live projects and examples within the training sessions.
Setting the expectation that these ‘Bootcampers’ will be supported and supervised by a BCSME, the client now has a 15-strong resource pool to tap into when planning their programmes, ensuring every project has the BC resource needed to complete the key tasks. The trainees themselves have a new set of skills, new opportunities in the workplace, new connections across the business and are exposed to a variety of work that breaks down internal stovepipes more effectively than imagined.
Additional benefits included a consistent approach to these core activities – having your teams using similar processes and templates across the business reduces risk, encourages positive behaviours and further demonstrates the benefits of good business change.
The BC Bootcamp suite has been so successful with the client it is now a consistent training feature, running every quarter and is in constant demand. We are now developing Business Analysis Bootcamps and Delivery Lead Bootcamps at the client’s request, and will be making these available to all customers.