We’re good at research, and budget setting, and requirements management. We know what we want, and how to go about getting it. If it’s not good for us, we walk away.
So, why are we often so bad at doing this in the workplace? Is it because we want something more quickly, or cheaper, or both? Is it because of top-down management pressure to ‘just do it’, or unrealistic planning to satisfy someone’s unrealistic demands? In reality, it’s a combination of all the above, and it’s only when we are prepared to stand up and insist that the appropriate levels of effort and investment are applied to each task that we see the results we, and our stakeholders, expect.
This is why the activity to establish good requirements is so crucial to a project’s success.
Here at HM3 we pride ourselves on our ability to set accurate and realistic requirements for each and every project we carry out. Requirements should always be the first step in a project’s lifecycle, and will allow every individual involved to be made aware of what the expectations are from the outset.
Requirements should cascade into a schedule, they should inform and guide design and build decisions, and they should directly correlate with test plans so that there is a very clear, documented record of assurance and approval. Without them, one or all the phases of your project lifecycle could become open ended and impossible to measure.
When this happens, it becomes extremely difficult to move from one part of a project to another and if milestone payments are involved it’s likely very difficult to achieve them. Setting requirements before anything else is one of the foundational elements for achieving the successful delivery of agreed outcomes, and without them the inevitable result is that time and cost increase and output quality will be significantly lower.
After all, if you don't know the requirement how do you know when you've finished?!
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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.
On Saturday, HM3 directors Andy Mellor and Darren Henderson alongside Harry Mellor and Bryony Carter completed the Walking With The Wounded Cumbrian Challenge!
28km covered, nearly 1,700m of ascent and £2,275 raised.
An incredibly tough experience but one we’re proud to be a part of!
Thank you so much to every single person who donated, it means the world to us and goes towards a very important cause.
HM3 are very pleased to announce that we have achieved our Cyber Essentials Plus certification for the second year in a row!
With the ever-increasing threat of cyber attacks, the fact that we've been independently assessed by an expert who has confirmed that we have robust controls in place, is really reassuring. We're doing all that we can to protect against common threats and that's a great benefit to both our customers and ourselves.
