The Change Equation

Chapter 15 : The Assessment Process

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Carrying out an INPACT Assessment

The objective of an INPACT Assessment is to quickly gauge the capability of the organisation and whether they are likely to succeed in getting the planned benefits from the project they are embarking on. A typical assessment consists of the following steps:

• Map the Organisational Culture and Business Process Capability and combine these into an Organisational Capability indicator
• Test for shared objectives, assess the complexity of the project and analyse the gap between your capability and the complexity of your project
• Look for other factors that will impact on your success, such as the levels of distrust in your organisation, the lack of a robust Benefits Realisation Plan, lack of influence on external stakeholders or the appropriateness of the IT solution
• Calculate the potential impact of these indicators on the business case and share the results with your senior management to gain their ownership of the issues
• Develop a Route Map and implement an Action Plan to overcome the barriers and mitigate the risks.

1. Map your Organisational Capability

Use descriptions in Chapter 3 to identify the predominant organisational culture in your organisation (or that part of the organisation affected by the change project).

Assess your business process capability maturity using the CMM model in Chapter 4.

Combine the results as described in Chapter 4 to position your organisation's capability to manage change and take advantage of modernization and transformation projects.

2.   Test for shared objectives, assess the complexity of the project, analyse the capability/complexity gap

Ask the three linked questions of key stakeholders and score the responses:

• In your view, what are the main objectives and benefits of the project?
• Who is responsible for delivering the benefits?
• What are your responsibilities in the project?

Now ask the questions of your stakeholders that will allow you to plot the three complexity factors. This establishes where your project lies actually on the scale of ‘Simple' to ‘Too Complex', as opposed to where people think it lies.

Map the results on the exponential complexity scale.

Put the results of the complexity measurement into the context of your organizational capability to show the relative complexity of the project.

4. Look for other factors that will impact on your success

Distrust: Identify the level of distrust between stakeholder managers, their own managers and staff and map this to show the potential impact of distrust on your project:

Benefits Realisation: Ask the two questions in Chapter 13 and assess the likelihood that clamed benefits will actually be realised.

External stakeholders: The project may involve stakeholders that are outside the project manager's sphere of influence, such as suppliers or partnering organisations. These can have a significant impact on the project. If you suspect that this is the case with your project, include an appropriate weighting when you calculate the potential impact in the next step.

IT solution: Similarly, if your project revolves around the introduction or upgrade of an IT system to drive and support new, more efficient ways of working or give you capabilities to scale up or deliver new services, consider the five key questions in Chapter 17. If they indicate an overall ‘Low' score, include an appropriate weighting under that heading in the next step.

4.   Calculate the potential impact of these indicators on the business case and share the results

Each of these measures can be used to calculate the potential impact of the barriers on the project's business case. Each will have an impact on either the project's costs and timescales or the levels of savings and revenue benefits, if the underlying causes are not addressed. Plot your findings on the table, giving a weighting % for each based on the indicators and your own knowledge of the more detailed story that lies behind the scores, along the lines shown.

Each indicator will be your assessment of the increased cost and/or timescale, or reduction in revenue benefits, based on the data you have collected, combined with your experience. So these figures are subjective, which is why I have called them indicators.

As you collect case study evidence of project assessments, you will be able to firm up on these figures, establishing benchmarks against which your assessment can be compared.

I have found that the most effective way to use these indicators is to run a workshop after an assessment, at which the key decision-makers are represented. Bring together senior managers, process users and stakeholders and use the model to open up the dialogue.

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