On our last post on change management for operational organizations we covered integration risks. Continuity risks are as serious as integration risks and it’s precisely here that you can generate enough havoc to compromise your mission. Read on to discover how you can mitigate this loophole on operations change management.
Continuity risks are tightly connected to the ability to continue to operate at a minimum capacity or throughput when you change something in a rolling operation. As it turns out, if you don’t mitigate this kind of risks before you make the change, you can actually breakdown your operation in such a way that recovery may not even be possible.
What can you do to prevent this from happening and actually aim for exceeding your expectations in terms of results?
- Pilot it: During change conceptualization, take extreme care in piloting change, using real life conditions and multiple variations. Look for efficiency bottlenecks, gather impressions from key users and record measurement results for each piloted variation. Use an incremental approach and never forget to go to the shop floor to see in real life how change will be carried out and how it will work in the actual conditions where it will be implemented. This will prevent unrealistic assumptions to be made and it will give sure certain compliance with your actual operational conditions.
- Test it: At least in two different test cycles, performed by different test teams and then take time and effort to perform a stress test. Very often what works on test conditions doesn’t hold in real life conditions. It’s very hard, but volume and concurrency are just different animals all together. And it’s only when you test it in harsh conditions that you will see that the support infrastructure (people, system and process) will actually work. The upside is that you will be safe to put it to work and focus on adjusting the wrinkles that may appear.
- Ramp it up: Going from 0 to 100 takes time, it just doesn’t happen in a blink of an eye. So, don’t go all in when you’re changing anything in your operation. Plan for an incremental change, so you can adjust to the change as volume or throughput increases. Depending on the level of change and the amount of stakeholders involved, take enough time to assure that change sets in and that both people, processes and systems are in the same page as to what they need to do and deliver.
These strategies have been tried and tested in real life during harsh changes we’ve been proud to be a part of. Take a look at some of these change success stories here.
