TRANSFORMATION QUALITY MANAGEMENT: Standards and Leading Practices

Transformation Quality Management is not a new concept. But it is constantly changing and maintaining awareness of leading practices and standards is essential to an ability to sustain the value created from change.

There are many statistics that have been shared to describe the current state of value creation from business projects. It is fair to say that business performance is mixed when it comes to not only effectively changing but also maintaining that value over time.

Sandcastle Change believes that seven distinct factors influence project value creation. The more maturity a company has across those seven factors, the more likely they are to realize the value they want from project investments. The seven factors are:

1. Transformation Quality Management

2. Benefits Management

3. Governance

4. Strategy

5. Solution

6. Plan / Baseline

7. Skills / Assets

There are two dimensions to Transformation Quality Management and this brief focuses on one of them: Standards and Leading Practices. We want to see three things in this factor:

· Leading practices have been purposefully included in standards to be observed during program execution

a. A mature transformation ability is hallmarked by the intentional application of leading practices. Leadership should purposefully design/adapt leading practices to their organization with the purpose of elevating operational maturity and accelerating to value.

· Specific value driving leading practices are included in program/project management processes and tools

a. Higher forms of transformation maturity will come from the application of frameworks such as PMBOX (PMI), ADKAR (PROSCI), Six Sigma, Business Process Reengineering, CMMI (ISACA), Governance, Risk, and Controls by COSO. There are many others (such as Agile) but those are a good starting point.

· Assurance and validation processes and resources have been established, communicated, and are actively executed

a. It is one thing to apply leading practices with the intent of elevating change maturity and quite another to get value from those practices. That value creation comes from taking actions that make sure the practices are properly applied over time. Just as with Risk and Control design for projects, we apply Risk and Control concepts to frameworks. Our goal is to ensure that it is designed and operated effectively and we do that through prevention or detection methods as we do with any form of control.

Sandcastle Change uses the Transformation Readiness Framework to drive institutional maturity around a company’s ability to effectively introduce change. To learn more, visit www.sandcastlechange.com.