Set your foundations: prepare and plan
Get ready for your HE transformation journey: Part Five
By Jennifer Tavano-Gallacher
VP Higher Education at Inoapps
In our previous blogs we looked at the key building blocks of your project: your project teams, your capability model and your governance structure. We’ll now look at the best way to sequence events when you kick off the early stages of program planning.
This is the first step in your transformation journey. I liken it to when you first think about a home renovation. This is the phase when you start reading renovation articles online, start to think about costs and what you’re trying to achieve.
This is the period of the program when you have the most time to think. You have yet to onboard a large team of consultants or seconded staff. You can take your time to figure out exactly what the organization needs and wants before you’re under the pressure of a significant project burn rate.
Know what you’re trying to accomplish
First and foremost, you need to agree what you’re trying to accomplish. As with a renovation, where you need to decide if you’re doing this to have your dream home, to increase the resale value, or just to show off to the neighbors, as an organization you need to know what’s driving this transformation.
Are your drivers to:
- Improve business process through centralization or standardization
- Reduce costs
- Improve user experience
- Resolve technical issues
It’s important for your organization to come to a consensus on why they are doing this, as that’s what needs to underpin your decision making.
Establish a priority order
It’s possible that more than one of these drivers is at play, but then it’s important to agree on an order of priority. Too often, in order to achieve consensus, universities end up with a list of ten-plus things the project should deliver, and that tends to complicate decision making and allow special interests to take hold.
Agreeing on the priority order is arguably the hardest thing to do in this stage. But remember, getting your priorities clearly set out and communicated is critical to success, and right now you have time to get this right.
Create your capability model
Once you’ve set your priorities, it’s time to agree your capability model as it will underpin all of the remaining project stages. We recommend that you start with a template and refine your model from there. If you haven’t already, read our blog on building your capability model here.
Establish your Process Owner Groups
This is also the time to establish your Process Owners Groups (POGs). These are the Process Champions we talk about in Part Two. These teams support both the governance and requirements gathering needed for future project phases. At this stage, you can set out their terms of reference and begin forming the teams. Read more about this in our blog about establishing project governance.
Refine your objectives
With overarching objective, capability model and POGs established, you have what you need to break out and refine your objectives by capability area.
Ideally the POGs do this in workshops focused on the capabilities for each of their areas. For example, if the Procurement POG is focused on process improvement, they now need to break this down into their top three objectives for this. These could be improving financial controls, decreasing the cycle time from requisition to order, and improving supplier relationships.
Then you move to the next level in your capability model and drill down to the top three objectives that support those procurement objectives. This approach gives you the kind of detailed view you need to resonate across the different areas of the organization.
Define program leadership
This is also the time to identify your program sponsor and establish the program board. It may feel a bit early for this, but as with the POGs, sooner is better for establishing ways of working between key players.
Communicate the upcoming change
Lastly, get going with setting up your change and communications stream. Yes, you should be communicating what you’re doing and why to the university as early as this. Otherwise, it’s like starting your renovation without telling your partner.
Let everyone know about the key objectives by capability and who the Process Champions are for that capability. The goal here is for everyone impacted by changes to each capability to knows what the top three objectives are and who to go to with ideas to improve them. This will really help you get your users engaged, onboard and feeling like they have a say and a stake in the program.
And now your foundations are set
With these key areas of the program established up front, you have both the vision and structure in place for the future stages. But now comes the tricky part of deciding on your most sensible starting point.
If you’d like to talk about how best to plan out your Higher Education transformation project, look no further than the team of friendly HE experts here at Inoapps.