I was reminded this week of the critical importance of communicating within a corporation. I'm working right now for a client who is implementing a new financial planning, forecasting and budgeting tool at a company currently in bankruptcy. The new financial system is designed to help with top down budgeting and improve cost management once the client emerges from bankruptcy protection. As with any project of this type there are good days and bad and things that go well along with things that could go better. There are always problems and always room for improvement.
The unique challenge of this client is not the number of problems or their severity, but rather it is the absolutely unpredictability of them. After having worked on projects like this one for years you start to anticipate problems along the way and it's possible (sometimes easy) to plan for them. However this client has been blindsided (and blind sided the consultants) at least half a dozen times with things that should not really be problems. After giving it lots of thought and analysis I've decided that the root cause of the problems is the sheer scale of change happening and the failure of upper management to communicate this change to the rest of the company.
In order for any large-scale change to be effective management needs to ensure that everyone is in the loop, on the same page, and driving toward the same goal. Often times, you need to communicate vastly more than you think is necessary. My current client has a monthly update meeting for the staff and a weekly email that consists of an excel spreadsheet detailing milestones and complications. Think about that for a second: 1 email a week that speaks to the minutiae of the project and one meeting per month. We are talking about communicating to a group of people who just underwent a 30% reduction in staff, are currently undergoing a massive reorganization of the people who are left and are implementing completely new financials systems and processes. Departments are changing, responsibilities are being added and removed, people have new bosses and new direct reports and at the end of the day, everyone seems afraid to act. The people who work here are smart, talented and well-intentioned. Unfortunately none of them have any clear set of expectations.
The executives of this company need to be shouting from the rooftops about the importance of this project. They need to take every opportunity to engage their people in as many forums as possible. They need to explain what is happening, why it is happening, how it is happening and what each and every person can do to ensure that it happens successfully. They need to explain to middle management so that middle management can pass the information on to their staff. Middle management has taken no ownership of the project and most of this is because upper management has not explained why it's important and how it will help.
This should be an exciting time for the employees, customers and stakeholders. I truly believe that this company can emerge successfully from bankruptcy and return to profitability. But that will only happen if the broken communication model is fixed.
Always over-communicate.
Always.
Good Talk, Tom
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