Organisations are constantly going through changes and as such business and IT units are used to managing change and change initiatives. They will have processes, people and governance to handles such change. However this does not usually translate well when we move from small changes and small to medium projects or initiatives to large multi million, multi year projects and programmes.
We have seen organisations expect people and processes to "scale up" activities in order to deliver these much bigger projects, but in almost all cases does does no go well. Its not to say that the people involved are not capable of doing this, it is generally due to the fact the the large programme requires scale that has to be built up over time and prior experience that generally does not exist, and like all things we do in life, the first time we do something is not always the most successful. We get better as we learn and repeat.
It is also important that the organisation do not completely dismantle it ability to do small change and deal with ongoing issues that are normal is the day to day running of the business. Assigning your best people to a large programme will take them off the pitch for a long time, and it is unrealistic and unfair to expect them to double job (in key roles) on a large strategic programme.
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