If you read the title of this article and made the presumption that change is related to a PowerPoint slide, it is not. Let me explain. Change is happening at a faster and faster rate in today’s business world more than ever before. The drive to compete, reduce costs, bring new offerings to the market, to pivot your company to a new way of working, means that change programmes are often run back to back and sometimes, one is not even finished before the next one starts.

Nearly every change programme occurring normally is based on leveraging some sort of new technology platform; whether it is an IT Service Management tool, some new hardware platform or some new application in support of the change agenda. What then follows is the development and deployment of key features and the presumption that deploying the technology is going to enable changes to work processes, which will mean changes to the peoples’ working practices and the programme benefits will be realised. 

Taking this approach is almost guaranteed to fail. In fact, research carried out by Harvard Business School and Strativity¹ found that participants of their survey ranked poor communication (62%), insufficient leadership and support (54%), organizational politics (50%), lack of understanding of the purpose of the change (50%), lack of user buy-in (42%) and lack of collaboration (40%) as the most critical issues to change programmes succeeding. These are all human problems. Hence the first ‘P’ in PPTX.

People

"Sending out an email or PowerPoint slide is not communicating..."

Processes

"If you are serious about change in your organisation, you need to have a group that supports the changes across the organisation..."

Technology

Finally, the “X” factor