Lost in transformation? How a PMO helps with planning change

Have you ever been lost? Truly lost, with no idea where you are or which direction to head to get back to safety? A growing feeling of isolation as the familiarity of what you thought you knew falls away and you begin to question every thought and decision you make. The sun begins to set. Panic sets in, the obvious solution can be missed, tempers fray, and every step forwards is filled with trepidation – could this be making things worse? Being that lost isn’t a nice place to be, and people rarely function at their best when lost. 

Consider your change programme, you’re taking the business into unfamiliar territory. You probably have a destination or target state in mind but to get there will need many steps, solutions and decisions to be made.  Even if the journey looks simple at the outset, going from A to B, or current to target state, the complexity of your transition can quickly mount up. The destination or vision can become obscured by the day-to-day challenges of change. You and your teams can quickly become lost.  

How can you make sure you safely and efficiently reach your transformation destination? 

You need a route which will take you through the complexity of transformation, across the mire of competing priorities and guide you all the way to your target state. 

You need a clear plan, but not just any plan. You need the right plan for your change and your business. This is where an expert PMO can help. A great Enterprise, Portfolio, Programme or Programme Management Office (PMO) are experts in planning. With the right plan creation, management and governance in place supported by great processes, tools and most importantly, experience, they can help you navigate the unfamiliar territory of change and make sure you successfully reach your target destination. 

How can expert PMO support you with the right plan? 

The starting point to building an effective plan is to understand three key things: where we are today, where do you want to be – your Destination and therefore what needs to change. Very basic, the equation for our plan is: 

Where we are now + Change to be made = Destination 

We also need to remember that the change isn’t just about introducing new things such as processes, or technology. It’s also about stopping old things; decommissioning legacy systems or business processes: 

Change to be made = New things to start + Old things to stop 

Sounds simple, but often even understanding these basic states can be a challenge. Where we are now might be well known within the business, but if you’re partnering with third parties for the change, they are unlikely to know all the intricacies of your operation. The destination may be articulated as a high-level vision or as part of a strategy without the underlying detail you need to understand the change to be made. To address this, it’s important to spend time to properly understand and shape the change to be made before starting.  

We don’t need to understand every detail for every step in the change before we start. In fact, spending time trying to identify every small task, step and stage in the full transformation is likely to be wasted effort. Constructing a highly detailed plan for a delivery stage months or even years in the future will add limited value as by the time the stage is reached, the plan is highly unlikely to still be accurate and appropriate. Things will change, the old adage that ‘No plan survives contact with the enemy’ is still very true – though ‘No plan remains unchanged in the face of reality’ might be a better fit. Using an Agile delivery methodology may help you break down the transformation into defined time-boxed chunks or items on the change backlog, but you could equally use a Waterfall approach with a stage-based planning horizon. What’s important to remember is we will spend our time understanding in detail the steps in the near-term and accept a lower level of detail for transformation further in the future. Having PMO expertise can help you set the right planning horizon and help you regularly return to the plan to add the next phase of detail you need to keep delivery progressing. 

When constructing a planning horizon, we need to make sure: 

• The plan for the current stage is detailed enough for day-to-day control of the transformation 

• The plans for future stages contain sufficient detail to give stakeholders confidence in the end-to-end delivery schedule and the route to reach the overall destination 

How to build an effective delivery plan 

When the change to be made has been sufficiently understood for the whole delivery, and more detail recognised for the near-term activities, we can begin to effectively plan. Successful delivery plans don’t exist in isolation, but within the delivery control environment which a great PMO is expert in. By understanding interaction of all these controls (e.g. Scope, Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), Change, Benefits, Risk & Issues and Resources) you can create and manage an effective plan for the duration of delivery. 

Planning accurately, based on reliable estimates, having understood the inter-dependencies of tasks, and external dependencies we will be able to create a transformation plan which represent the most likely course of events. Here we will explain how we can create the plan to set delivery up for success. Experience shows us that change programmes which jump too quickly into a planning tool without proper consideration of the products, tasks and inter-dependencies often produce inaccurate plans which require constant re-planning to respond to the environment. To counter this we’ll look at 4 steps:  

• Outcome/Product/Task Identification 

• Inter-dependency analysis 

• Estimation 

• Construct & Review. 

Step 1: Outcome/Product/Task Identification 

Identify the key outcomes, products and tasks which will make up the plan. Working from both ‘Right to Left’ (from the end back) and then checking ‘Left to Right’ (from the start forwards) you will be able to identify all the building blocks which will be needed to get from the current state to the destination. You can use an Outcome Network Diagram (or PERT chart) to identify the logical sequence which these blocks will follow. By asking yourself the question for each step ‘what’s needed for this to be so?’ you can quickly work backwards through the plan from the end goal. Remember that the level of detail at which tasks are being identified will vary based on your planning horizon.  

The identified tasks and products can be captured in a Product, Work or Task breakdown structure (PBS, WBS or TBS). A PBS, WBS or TBS will further help you identify additional elements of the plan you’ll need to be successful and will be a useful tool for both dependency analysis and estimation. If you’re working in Agile, these breakdowns will become your backlog. 

Step 2: Inter-dependency analysis 

The Outcome Network Diagram, PBS, WBS or TBS should allow you to identify dependencies between the deliveries within your change and dependencies from outside the change. Dependencies will need to be called out and agreed between the supplier and the consumer before you can have confidence your plan is achievable. Dependencies should clearly articulate who, is delivering what, to whom and when. It is also helpful to articulate the impact of that dependency not being delivered on time.  

If your delivery is the supplier of a dependency, it is important to capture those requirements (and the work leading up to them) in the breakdown structures and plan. Having a clear milestone at the handover of the dependency will make tracking easier. 

Step 3: Estimation 

Estimation is key in the planning process. Too often a delivery lead disappears into a darkened room, creates a plan then tells others how long it will take based on their view and the final deadline or commitment which has been made. A plan based on this sort of estimation is unlikely to be successful. Those who will be doing the work should be involved in the estimation of the work. Ideally multiple independent estimators (such as different members of the team) should be consulted.  

You could use techniques such as planning poker with the team or completing 3-point estimates, with each case the basis of estimate captured, describing why a particular estimate was arrived at. This is particularly useful to assist estimates standing up to challenge and will help us learn lessons in future where estimation may be inaccurate. It is very easy for time in a plan to be removed to ‘make it fit’ if the reasoning for a particular duration not being understood – but much harder when the team can give clear reasoning why the estimated duration is the right one. 

During delivery unexpected events will occur. To manage these events, it’s prudent to include a level of schedule contingency in the plan. By having contingency explicitly called out at various key points in the plan (rather than hidden within individual activities or all grouped at the end) it becomes possible for the delivery lead to call upon contingency to mitigate delays to downstream activities. The level of contingency appropriate for your change will be unique to your delivery. When called upon, an amount of contingency can be released from the reserve and transferred to the activity requiring more time. This allows the remaining contingency to be monitored. When using contingency in this way the Critical Path through the plan must be understood as you may create a false sense of security, with reserves of contingency which aren’t on the Critical Path through delivery giving the impression more contingency is available than can be used without impacting key milestones. 

Step 4: Construct & Review 

Reviewing outcomes, products, tasks estimates and dependencies prior to constructing the plan is a key activity. Change stakeholders should be engaged and walked through the outcome networks and estimates to ensure the delivery will produce the required business outputs before the plan is constructed. Many planning tools make detailed review time consuming and laborious (you are unlikely to spot a missing dependency across a huge plan, but it could be the one which trips delivery up).  

Hierarchy of the plan 

Your change is going to be complex. It’s often not possible to represent clearly the required detail in a single plan artefact. To address this, it’s worth considering a Plan Hierarchy. Within a simple Plan Hierarchy (Figure 1), you could include three levels: 

Figure 1: Plan Hierarchy 

By using a Plan Hierarchy, you can more easily communicate the journey you’re taking using a High-Level Plan, track and manage dependencies and cross-programme links using a Mid-Level plan and understand the detail of the change in Sub-Plans and Stage Plans. Keeping all these levels in-step can be a challenge of managing your plan, but PMO can support here. 

Managing the plan 

By being thorough in understanding the products and tasks needed, the need for major replans should be kept to a minimum. Out of date plans or plans which don’t represent reality are misleading and result in poor decisions being taken. For your plan to remain current and accurate it must be regularly updated, expert PMO can help you get the required updates and keep your plan current. By tracking actual progress achieved to date, and adjusting for any activities which are off course or require more time to deliver successfully, you can be confident in progress. An up-to-date plan should show no tasks in the past which are due to have completed and are still in progress and no tasks which were due to start in the past which have not yet commenced. Similarly, no actual progress dates can be in the future (it’s not possible for a task to have started next week). If you’re using a planning tool, be mindful of the impact tracking changes will have on the downstream plan (make sure your constraints and dependencies are correct between plan activities). If you’re working with Agile, remember to re-compute your velocity and remaining backlog. 

It’s natural the plan will undergo a level of change. As later stages in the change kick-off, more detail will be added for these stages, some things will go better than expected, others will go less well and it is likely scope will change and evolve. The plan needs to be a living document changing to continue to reflect reality. It’s a good idea, whenever a major change takes place to take a baseline of the plan. This allows you to easily measure progress against a known point in time – quickly detecting changes and delays to the plan using tools such as milestone-slip charts so you can quickly spot activities needing management attention. 

We’ve shared some guidance on how to construct and manage your change plans. Planning effectively is a key driver for successful delivery, but it’s not easy. Project One has PMO experts, each with years of real-world day after day experience of planning and plan management. With the right plan creation, management and governance in place supported by great processes, tools and most importantly, experience, a PMO expert can help you navigate through the complexity of transformation, across the mire of competing priorities and guide you all the way to achieving your business goals. Don’t get lost in transformation, have PMO support your planning. No man is an island, and no plan delivers in isolation. Please get in touch via theteam@projectone.com.