10 Tips for Successful Go Live: Begin with the End in Mind

As a veteran of FIVE end–to-end transformation and shared services programmes since 1996, together with consulting for numerous other clients since 2010, I am often asked: what works best, what are your key learnings, and what advice would you give?

While there is no single “cut and paste” solution, since each company has its own culture, its own spend budget and change readiness/agility, there are certainly some common factors that can make a great difference to the speed of implementation and effectiveness of your transformation.

My own experience to date is based on working with these 5 global companies:

SmithKline Beecham 1996-2000, GSK 2001-2002, The Coca-Cola Company 2007- 2010 NCR Corporation 2011-2013 Carlson Wagonlit Travel 2014-2016

My primary focus has been with Human Resources transformation, plus a dose of Global Business Services – integrating IT, Finance and HR back-office functions – and yet the journey to go-live success is a similar one whatever function you are transforming. So where I have referenced HR, you can easily substitute your own function.

Go-Live is that high profile moment when you turn all the thinking, planning, blood, sweat and tears of knowledge transfer into a new operational model, a model which the customers can see, feel, touch and truly experience. It’s just like suddenly opening a restaurant and facing customers for the first time, who will offer feedback on what they didn’t like.

So, once a week for the next 10 weeks, I’ll be sharing here are my 10 top tips for Transformation Go-Live Success.

1. Begin with the end in mind. One of Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits! Plan. Think future stateKnow your goals.

Establish a visual blueprint of your future organization and your target operating model. Be clear on the deliverables, and desired outcomes; the measures of success in terms of operational effectiveness, customer satisfaction and cost efficiency. Define and agree these upfront with your key stakeholders. Plan ahead and get answers to these points before you get sucked into doing mode.

2. Create a Compelling Vision to move forward. Draw your own Big Picture. By working together with the design team, and actually articulating the vision by physically drawing a tableau, you can describe the company’s future state, which you can show and share with others to get them involved and engaged. A picture is worth a thousand words: it draws people in, starts a conversation, creates meaning and a dialogue for change.

To move forward we need to create a compelling vision, and a story the company believes in. It is a journey map with key milestones and a pot of gold on the other side of the mountain. The vision and the story that goes with it will, particularly for senior managers, have both a clear business case and like all good stories, be capable to win hearts and minds.

Share real stories from other companies who have already had successful journeys, especially if they survived and thrived. Provide real case studies, real people with real roles in the new model. Describe “a day in the life of” for each of the key roles in your future organization.

3. Engage your key stakeholders early. Enlist business “change champions”. Obtain the customer’s voice. Before you start to implement new ways of working, be sure to get real supporters from your side of the business. Convert spectators into participants and enlist “change champions” who can talk positively about the benefits of self-service, portal and system technology. This will free up true HR business partners to spend more time supporting the business agenda and less time on administration.

Change champions are leaders, role models (walking the talk), who are well respected by other managers and thus engender and enable peer and cascade credibility to the transformation Their enthusiasm, business savvy and effective communication style, will help the transformation to become a business transformation, a new way of working, not just something for and on behalf of HR (or another back-office function).

The line manager then becomes a people manager who has more ownership of hiring, onboarding, managing performance and engagement of their team. They become responsible also for initiating system transactions for their teams. Good people managers will lead by example.