In this post we covered what are the fundamental risk areas that make up your operations change landscape. One of them is integration, a very common source for deal breaker situations that just drive you into the wall while trying to kick off operation changes. Read on to discover a few strategies to mitigate the integration risks that spawn from implementing change in operations.
You probably think that by integration risks I mean IT-related, system wise integration issues that may appear when you change some kind of system support for an operational scenario.
It’s true that’s one of the integration risks that we must consider, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg, when it comes to integration risks. Let’s list them all and take a look at the possible mitigation strategies for each one.
System: IT systems are a vital piece of operations and it’s impossible to conceptualize an operational landscape without such support. Changing something at the operations level that prompts current systems or entering systems to integrate in a different way or with different systems to bring about change itself is a serious risk. To mitigate this issue you need to:
- Identify technical owners for each of the involved systems, with a minimum competency set and relevant experience, that have enough ownership to provide actual support to any modification and information request related to the information being exchanged and the processes that generate, trigger and process these flows;
- Include technical owners in all project stages, promoting clear and global information about the process, the information, events and requirements to all stakeholders;
- Create clear, stable test environments that replicate all involved systems in the process change, assuring team ownership about those systems and the processes required to generate and validate required data;
- Design complete integration testing scenarios, validated and approved by all relevant technical owners, which much be executed at least in two different test cycles by different testing teams, with evidence collection and validation;
- Execute load tests on relevant scenarios to assure interface stability, performance and resilience.
People: People tend to resist change, moreover if that change entails responsibility increase, service level improvement, cycle team reduction or activity proliferation. To mitigate this, you need to seriously engage in managing the impacts of putting people in the line. Some of the things you must do are:
- Involve people early in the process. The later you engage them, the more easily they will be susceptible to imagine the wrong things about what’s about to change;
- Be clear, concise and transparent about what’s changing. If you don’t know what exactly is going to change, be clear about the areas that will be affected and the schedule that will bring on that change;
- Invest in creating multiple layers of engagement, to assure knowledge transfer and promote change selling. Focal points, deeply engaged in the change process are extremely useful in passing on the appropriate message and allow you to scale training quickly;
- Training is never enough, so be sure to create appropriate training schemes and schedules that should be executed as close to the change date as possible.
Process: Changing a process, for whatever reason, means that you’ll do either new things or change the way you already do something. Either way, there are critical integration aspects at the process level that you need to focus on:
- Pilot all activities in real life scenarios, to assess if you’ll have the adequate performance and information in every step of the process. If not, assure that you put in place the tools, interfaces, training and information for each activity to reach the intended results;
- Check if all information is available at the right time in each activity and the source of that information is reliable and accessible. If not, cross check your people and system risks to make sure you have the appropriate information on the right spot at the right time;
- Check if the information generated in each activity reaches the target and you are forwarding the required information to the right target at the right time;
- Assure that you have activity level and process level monitoring tools and metrics that tell you if exceptions occur and if performance is up to par with your KPIs;
- Perform an upstream and downstream consistency check, so you assure that the requirements and results of the process meet the requirements established by the involved stakeholders.
Putting these strategies in place while changing an operation will assure that you eliminate your integration risks, therefore guaranteeing that you’ll be able to engage confidently in change.
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.
