During transformation, prioritisation
is the power that you need really to say no.
It’s knowing as a company what you need to do now,
what can be left until later,
or actually what doesn’t need to be done at all.
In its simplest form, it’s about just saying yes or no to stuff.
To me prioritisation is really important
because really it’s the unsung hero of a transformation.
There’s a lot of focus on the triage and the identification of opportunities,
there’s also a lot of focus of course in terms of implementation.
Prioritisation is this small but crucial step,
right in the middle that is absolutely vital,
because without doing it,
then you start getting confusion.
It also helps create crystal-clear focus
on what the objective of the transformation is.
You know, you think it’s to do with how do I manage resources,
it’s actually about sending a message to the organisation
that says these three, four, five things are the most important to us right now.
Some of the key things that go wrong,
there are many individual factors,
but one of them I would class as the “I want it all” syndrome.
It’s like being a child in a sweets shop,
seeing this vast array of brilliant initiatives and ideas that people have,
all of which give me for instance great EBITDA improvements
or all of these things that I want.
So it’s very easy, particularly for a CEO or a head of transformation
to say yes I want some of all of this.
And here it’s very difficult to say no.
I tend to think, in a transformation,
teams spend 80% of their efforts on the diagnostics,
the identification of projects and improvement ideas,
and 20% of their time, and bandwidth and mental space
on implementation.
I really personally believe that’s the wrong way around.
You should spend 20% of your time on the diagnostics,
and know whether the things that you identify,
are they big, do they move the needle, and do they take us in the right direction?
Then you’re generally happy with the scale of improvement they bring.
Once you’ve done that, you should move with planning and prioritisation of course,
onto implementation.
And then spend most of your time on actually getting things done.