Predicting doomsday: is your transformation initiative in trouble?

Can this initiative be rescued? Or is it doomed to failure?

If you’ve worked on any transformation initiative, I expect that you have asked these questions when things were difficult. If you were a member of the team, you may have wondered whether it was time to find a new project. If you were a leader of the initiative, you may have wondered whether you were up to the job. And if you were a sponsor of the initiative, you may have wondered whether you should apply your sponsorship elsewhere.

In my last couple of blog posts, I wrote about the importance of sustaining energy in large scale transformation, and offered some suggestions on how to keep going. James Cole, who leads architecture for the British Red Cross, asked in the comments for suggestions about when to persevere and when to think again - about how to detect that your initiative is doomed.

As usual, I don’t have all the answers, but have a few suggestions. These suggestions all start with the thought that, while transformation initiatives come in all shapes and sizes, they have three things in common: they build solutions to deliver outcomes for a sponsor. Whether you are building a new architecture which transforms the cost and revenue base of your company to achieve your CEO’s vision, or whether you are upgrading your testing tools to improve your release frequency to meet the collective objectives of your team, you have the same three terms in the equation: solution, outcome and sponsor. And if one or all of these is missing, or have changed in unexpected ways, you may be doomed.

The sponsors have stopped sponsoring

Sponsors play many important roles: they provide resources and support; they remove obstacles and give you guidance. But their most important role is to want the change that you are delivering. And sometimes it turns out that they don’t want it any more.

There are many legitimate reasons why sponsorship may disappear. People change roles, and are replaced by others with different strategies and priorities. The sponsor may stay the same, but their priorities and purpose may change.

When leading a transformation initiative, you should keep asking whether the sponsor is engaged. Is the initiative still important to them? Are they still prepared to make difficult calls and give you the help that you need? Would they still choose this initiative over alternatives? If not, it might be time for some difficult conversations.

The equation doesn’t work any more

Whenever you undertake a transformation initiative, you have made a choice to invest time, effort, money and other resources in order to deliver an outcome which you value.

One of the difficulties of large scale transformation is that it can be difficult (or even impossible) to accurately determine both values in this equation at the outset. You may discover, partway through the initiative, that the values have changed and that the equation doesn’t make sense any more.

This means that it’s important to do two things in large scale transformation initiatives. Firstly, it’s important to continuously refine your understanding of the values in your equation as you progress: experience will take you further than analysis. Second, it is important to be realistic if your analysis turns out to be wrong. Realism means that you can adapt your strategy, goals and method to fit your experience: a lack of realism means that you may drift into doom without realising it.

The solution does not solve your problem

Whatever your initiative, you are implementing some form of solution. The most obvious solutions are technical: you are deploying or changing a system which creates some of functional or non-functional advantage. However, solutions can be cultural, procedural, technical or structural - anything which addresses a need is a solution.

And, when you embark on your initiative, your hypothesis is that your solution will meet your needs (which means that you will have done just enough work on the solution architecture - a big topic for another future post). Unfortunately, for large, complex transformations, that is often all we have at the beginning: a hypothesis and a solution architecture built on that hypothesis. Sometimes you will discover that your hypothesis was incorrect, and that the solution does not fit - in which case you may be doomed.

It’s important, therefore, to figure out how to test your hypothesis as your progress: initiatives which rely on a big reveal at the end (a big cutover, a sudden process change) defer the moment of doom.

But difficulty does not mean doom

In summary, I think that you should structure your initiative to continuously test whether your sponsorship, investment equation and solution hypothesis are still sound. This may sound obvious, but we often fail to ask these fundamental questions in favour of focusing on immediate tasks and activities. This may that we may slide into doom without realising it.

I also think that we should remember that, if these three things are sound, then you are probably not doomed. A lot of the things which make projects feel hard - struggles to hit deadlines, to obtain resources, to overcome process obstacles, to sustain motivation - are not signs of doom, they are simply signs of difficulty. And difficult things are often the things most worth doing.