What's the key to successfully implementing organisational change?
Client that wants to move towards best practice needs to know where they are now, where they want to go, and what they need to do to get there. Every client’s journey is unique, yet they also all follow a similar pattern. We’ve developed our own methodology for navigating the pathway to operational maturity that we use internally as well as externally.
Many organisations make the mistake of thinking of their IT team purely as the people who keep the internet up, the printers going and the emails sending & receiving. And while those roles are certainly all critically important, they only scratch the surface of that team’s true purpose – to allow the business to meet its objectives and deliver on its targets. The organisation that both realises and acts on, this principle, is the one that reaches high levels of operational maturity and then reaps the benefits that come from that. They do this by ensuring that their operations are assessed holistically, not just technically.
Although the path to best practice is unique to each client, there are patterns and similarities in each journey. We’ve been helping clients move toward best practice for a long time and in doing so, we’ve developed our own methodology that we use in-house as well as with our client base. It’s a reliable and accurate method that follows a set of a very well defined and repeatable set of steps to achieve an outcome. Part of that process starts with our assessment method, utilising the Majestic Maturity Model to establish where a client is at when we start, or even before we start working with them. We make that assessment by having a look at their technology, their people and their interactions with the market in which they operate. We blend those elements to form a view of how mature the organisation is overall, with the result being that we gain a lot of visibility into both where the organisation currently is and where it needs to go.
That’s a really important distinction because quite often, organisations simply go-ahead to address problems or issues they’ve identified by deploying some kind of new technology, but they do it without having a look at the organisation holistically. They then miss key factors and end up making the wrong choices. We take all that away. We remove the guesswork by using our framework, which then enables us to understand exactly what you should be looking at doing and when, with both short and long term goals. We do that because we understand that everyone has finite access to funds with which to make a change. As importantly, if not, more importantly, we also understand that too much change in too short a time can in itself break things.
Then, these changes are implemented together with the organisation with ongoing monitoring and quality improvement process backing it up. It can take some time, but we end up with a great strategic solution and an increased level of operational maturity for the client. So that’s the process we engage in to deliver specific outcomes, and ultimately the way that we support our clients as their technology partners.
This week we’ve been discussing how Majestic works with its clients to improve their operational maturity. A key factor in our success with our clients is our ability to help them manage change. There are precious few organisations that can truly claim to have implemented wide scale (or in many cases, even mid-scale) changes and have them run smoothly. When a change implementation project does struggle, many organisations will look at how they handled its resource allocation, timelining or budget, and adjust accordingly next time. However, something that many organisations fail to consider when implementing change, is that change must be implemented into a company’s culture and be inclusive from the top down. Helping to manage change from a cultural perspective and considering team members comfort is one of the key facets that make our client’s change process a much smoother, and ultimately, successful one.
Last week we released a new article onto our LinkedIn company page “The 4 Critical Elements of an Organisation’s Operational Success” and in it, we introduced the Majestic Governance Meter. It allows organisations to identify themselves against the defined levels of maturity and identify where they are performing well, and where additional attention may be required.
