Four Things to Fund Before You Approve Your Next Transformation
Capacity is people, time, skills, and space to think. The business case prices the software and the implementation vendor, and stops there.
In a project retrospective, under the heading for what did not go well, somebody had written a single line: “Fitting the project work in with my day job.”
Further down the same document, someone else had written that the backfill they were promised never arrived, sot heir tam absorbed the work.
Some version of those sentences turns up in nearly every transformation we work on. A design workshop, then an operational meeting, then a status call. Two jobs carried, neither finished. They know there is no budget to backfill then, so they never ask.
Why does this rarely reach the executive team?
People do a quick calculation before they raise something. They run the likely response, based on what they have watched happen to colleagues who raised the same thing, and then decide whether it is worth the trouble. Researchers call the gap between the outcome you predict and the one you get prediction error, and predictions built from watching other people are hard to argue with.
So nobody is asking whether the capacity problem is real. They already know. They are working out what happens to them if they name it.
The escalation never comes. Status stays green. Nobody complaining, so nothing looks wrong.
What this cost is not what you would expect.
This looks like a wellbeing problem. It is not. the cost lands on the outcome.
You approved a transformation. What you will get is an implementation. Transformation means people redesign how the work is done, and redesign takes unscheduled hours that nobody has. So, the software goes in, the old process gets rebuilt inside it, and the benefits case is measured against a way of working nobody had the time to change.
You approved a transformation, what you will get is an implementation.
Capacity is four things. Fund each one.
People. Name them in the business case. Not roles, names, with the agreement of the manager whose team they come from. Watch for the same eight people appearing across every initiative in the portfolio, because that is your real constraint and it will never show up on a single project plan.
Time. Saying no is a sentence in a meeting. “Doing no” is naming the thing that stops, in writing, with a date, and telling people who were counting on it. If nothing came off the list, nothing was prioritized. Something was just added.
Skills. Two gaps hide here, and neither appears on a plan.
The first is the role nobody funded. There is no budget line for a project manager, the role is needed anyway, so a capable operations person is named to it. If they already had that capability, they would already be a project manager.
The second is quieter and costs more. The project manager is asked to lead the change as well, on the assumption that running the project and leading the transformation are one job. They are not. A good project manager holds the structure, protects the plan, and drives the work to done. Leading change means time spent with the people who are not on board yet, sitting with objections instead of closing them, and influencing across teams where you hold no authority. Ask one person to do both and you will get the one they are better at, which is managing the task plan.
Here is the part that compounds. When the person running the project or leading the change is still learning the role, the whole team runs inefficiently. Meetings that decide nothing and get scheduled again. Follow-ups that do not happen. Work redone because the decision was never really made. Every one of those hours comes out of the same people you did not backfill, and they are the hours those people were already short of.
Space to think. The first thing cut, because it looks like slack. Protect it as a funded item with a name on the schedule. It is the only capacity in which anything gets designed rather than processed, and designing something better is the reason you approved the initiative originally.
Ask one person to run the project and lead the change, and you will get the one they are better at, which is managing the task plan.
When does this conversation happen?
Before kickoff, in the readiness work. I wrote a while back that the pause you skip at the start is the one you pay for at the end, at many times the price. This is what that pause is for.
Ask the line managers, not the project team, whether the four capacity needs exist. Take the answer literally. They carry on the status report as its own line, beside schedule and budget. Nobody volunteers it. Most people will answer it when it is asked.
Now, over to you.
Look at your current initiative. Name the person carrying the most of it on top of a full job. Then name what came off their plate to make room.
The first answer will come quickly. If the second one does not come at all, you already know which of the four is missing.
3 Questions To Ask
Our benefits case assumes people work differently after the go-live. What did we fund that makes that possible?
How many of our approved initiatives depend on the same group of people, and which benefits are at risk if they are the constraint?
Who owns adoption, who owns the schedule, and have we asked one person to do both?