Take a moment and bring to mind a change project that your department is currently undertaking. Now, think of how much time and effort has been invested in defining the project's end state, the business benefits, current state and future state business requirements and the overall design of the project. These are examples of items that characterize the initiative. How much time has been spent in this area? Is it 50%, 60%, 70% or more?

How much time is being spent on understanding the impact of the deployment of this project on your current business model? Have you identified the stakeholders for the initiative? Are you working with them by preparing and supporting their needs to adopt the changes required for a successful outcome? In other words are you investing time in preparing your business constituents so that they can accept, adopt and advance the effort? This speaks to the 'ability' of the organization to employ the initiative.

Today's best practices call for a balanced approach in both the quality of the design and the ability of the business to adopt and advance the project. One of the essential elements of a well developed strategy is ensuring stakeholder alignment.

Stakeholder alignment facilitates a view into all the organizations, functions and departments that may be impacted by a strategic initiative. Each of these impacted areas are then further analyzed by defining the level of support required for that area to be successful. Structuring a stakeholder assessment is relatively simple and requires you to define the people or groups that have a "stake" in the outcome of the project. The real value comes from the learning of what it will take to gain the support of the stakeholder.

To determine a stakeholder's level of support requires the use of assessments, interviews, workout sessions and more. It is imperative that the project team understand the desired future state, organizational goals and the potential impact on the business community. There are critical skills required to successfully conduct these discussions, namely the ability to listen, understand and work together for a common resolution.

Conducting the stakeholder assessment will take time and effort. The benefits will propel the effort forward versus having stuck in the mud or going in circles. Are your efforts going as smooth as they could? Are your stakeholders effectively aligned? Harness the power and increase your project's momentum by aligning your stakeholders today.

contributed by Warren White

CUSTOMER SERVICE “BLITZ” IMPROVES SERVICE, PROVIDES ONGOING TRAINING

This luxury boutique hotel basks in the high-altitude sun and snow of the Rockies, and caters to skiers and snowboarders all winter, fly-fishers and mountain hikers and bikers in the summer. Guests who pay their $700+ room rates expect, no, demand very high levels of service. The hotel’s ownership and management demand no less, as they are in hot pursuit of AAA’s coveted 5-diamond status. Just to add pressure to the equation, the resort area is rapidly growing, and the employee pool is limited and in high demand. Employers must select good people and develop their employees internally, and work hard to keep them.

For the past two years, this property has used the Step One Survey IITM to help select high-quality employees, and has also used the Profile XTTM to insure good fit and high probability of success in building their management team. In the fall of 2004, before the ski season, they embarked on a full-scale “blitz”, designed to identify the common characteristics of their top customer service people and to provide coaching input for each staff member to improve individual customer service. The program also included training and feedback to ensure every member of their team was on the “same page” when it came to delivering “class 5-diamond” service.

The core of this intensive effort was Profiles International’s Customer Service PerspectiveTM assessment (CSP). Before the kickoff, management identified the hotel’s top performers in customer service. The CSP was administered to this group, and a Success Pattern was created. These top performers met with management to create the Company Service Perspective: Their consensus answers to the 49 very tough questions on service issues contained in the assessment—a thoughtful guide to “how we do it here.”

Built on this foundation, and implemented over a one-month timeline, the initiative followed this sequence: In week 1, all employees completed the CSP, requiring about a half-hour each, on-line. In week 2, all supervisors received training on proper use of the CSP’s Coaching Report, and received their own Coaching Report in the process. During the third week, every employee met with their supervisor, and the two discussed the Coaching Report results, and how to improve each employee’s customer service delivery.

The employee’s answers to the Company Service Perspective questions were discussed. With emphasis on where their responses differed from those developed by the top performers and management. Since many of these answers differ with perspective and situation, these were often lively discussions.

Week 4 was devoted to small-group workshops of 20 employees or fewer, and focused on the Company Service Perspective, the company’s answers, and the situations and circumstances leading individuals to have differing answers to these questions. The atmosphere was one of encouraging individual opinion, as the questions often have no one “right answer”. Participation was high, and the groups generally agreed, their awareness of the complexities of service issues had been greatly increased.

Finally, as follow-up to the initiative, individual working groups continued to discuss these questions and issues, one question at a time, through the winter as they held routine staff meetings. The Hotel participates in a third-party customer satisfaction measurement program, which provides a numerical summary of customer feedback on a monthly basis. Results of the program are below.

Spotlight: If it isn't broken - why fix it?

This phrase can be heard in hallway conversations repeated many times each day throughout the world, in multiple languages and countries. It can be in reference to an existing strategy, product, system, or process. At times it can clearly indicate the comfort level with today's solution versus the potential of the unknown.

When you take a closer look inside the business activities you find that most organizations have developed methods of coping with their shortfalls. The outcome is that layers of overhead are created to address the shortfalls. These layers protect the core and make it impenetrable.

This perspective is fortified when the company is growing and making money. In the industry this is known as 'institutionalization'. Therefore, some of these organizations may view change as 'needing to be fixed' and become resistant.

During economic downturns companies tighten the screws and look for ways to reduce overhead as survival tactics. While this practice is common, it is less common for companies that are succeeding to be reinventing themselves over and over again during their successful runs. Creating new strategies, products or processes that increase productivity, profits, customer satisfaction, employee morale and more, are essential to the longevity and resilence of any company.

This reinvention is not because they are broken, rather because they will not accept the status quo. Imagine a world that stayed status quo because it wasn't broken. Pretty scarey. It takes leaders with a vision, passion and courage for making the impossible possible.

There are many examples of courageous leaders:

• Andy Grove's pioneering efforts to keep leap frogging the last product at Intel
• Fred Smith transforming business communication overnight with Federal Express
• Michael Dell redrawing the playing field for Dell's competitive advantage
• Jack Welch igniting the fire at GE for excellence by not settling for the status quo

These are a few successful business leaders that chose to do something even though nothing was broken. It was about developing a new customer value proposition and to create a competitive advantage. It always take courage and leadership to reinvent, especially when you believe that you are not broken.

Building a culture of 'not settling for status quo' is a powerful asset that typically lays dormant in many companies. Is your company complacent? Perhaps it is time for a wake up call before the next economic challenge.

contributed by Pete Pazmany