The challenges of business transformation

I recently attended an American Chamber of Commerce event at the very impressive new terminal two at Dublin airport. It was fascinating to hear different organisations views of change. How they become aware it is required, how it’s managed and finally how they ensure it becomes part of their culture once they have been through the process.

The speakers, Dr Neil Boyle of MSD Human Health, Joe Cronin & Tim Mulcahy of Kelloggs, and Vincent Wall of the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) had some really interesting points.

• Should they share objectives with their customers? If so, how?
• What methodology should they adopt? How should they decide this?
• If they took a modular approach, how do they manage risk to ensure that business continues as usual?
• Should they utilise existing staff to manage change and how do they backfill these positions? Or should they engage with external consultants to assist?
• How do they ensure that review of the projects happens properly and the learnings are implemented?

From a personal perspective having gone through a Business Transformation programme with Hays over the last 2 years, I can only conclude that there are no hard and fast rules when approaching transformation.

I think that it is important that everyone involved in a project is aware of what success looks like and that there is a methodology in place that everyone understands. I believe that the biggest challenge that most organisations face is getting the transformation to become permanent once the project has been completed. Furthermore, it’s important that a business is continually critiquing itself and looking to improve processes and the more experience you have of doing this, the better the process of business transformation will become. One last observation is that it is very easy to take your eye off the ball when your business is in a growth phase, when in fact this may be the best time for business transformation.