James: So I've been working with a lot of partners for a long time implementing operational change. This has been my bread and butter with partners. And as part of that transformational journey to becoming a technology solutions partner and maturing on the stages of operational maturity as well, it's actually a process to follow when we're implementing this change. And it's something that many companies don't actually stop and follow by default.

I'm going to break these five phases down for you so you can start to understand what you need to start doing and maybe see the weaknesses in how you're going about implementing change and why a lot of your initiatives in the past have probably been either unsuccessful or ineffectual.

So the first phase to understand is actually called understand. This is the phase that we build awareness. This is where you need to educate yourself on the new concepts and the best practices so that you can create a purpose, a scope and assign responsibilities for the change. If we don't know what we're trying to achieve and everything that's wrapped around that from the start and really what good looks like, then we don't know what we're aiming for. This is already the first step that most people ignore and set ourselves up for failure at the very beginning.

Once we understand we move on to the next phase, phase two, which is called document. We this is all about preparation. So we understand what we're trying to achieve, we know what the best practices are, we know who's gonna drive this, then we need to start documenting it. And what I mean by this is it's not just documenting our goal, our rock, our objective of this - it's also what are our processes need to be? What's the policy actually there? What's the procedure? What are we actually going to implement?

And you'll find this funny because we're doing a lot of what we think should be the last step. We're doing this as the second step. And the reason why we do this is that we create clarity. We're actually doing a lot of the work there that's going to create sustainability and embed it into the business in the long term. There's a reason why we fail to implement a lot of initiatives that stick over the long term is because we miss a lot of that detail that's needed to run an operationally mature business.

So once we've got those processes, policies, procedures, configuration details, the next step is that we go to train and this phase here is where we communicate. This is when we get buy-in from the team that something is going to change.

And this is where we get that additional level than what we normally do because often we're communicating, yeah, we're going to change this and then we've either doing that after we've changed it or just before we change it. And it doesn't give our employees an opportunity to understand what the change actually is. And this is why we've just done that documentation stage is because we can bring that practical pragmatic detail to our team to go 'this is what we're implementing' so all of a sudden they can see clearly their frame of reference of what's happening and they can understand how it's going to impact them and they're in a position to provide feedback before implementation of things we may not have considered. This is a vital step that we always miss but our frontline people know a lot of things but find it hard to give feedback until they've got concrete things to work off. So this phase is actually one of the most critical things towards driving that successful implementation of operational change.

Now finally after we've done those three phases, we're now at the implement phase - phase four. This is where we actually take action. We should at this point have a clear implementation plan, our timeline, the launch expectations and we've planned around those contingencies. Now we go and implement it.

But this is where most of us start, we jump into that implementation and we don't have all of these details, we don't know what done looks like, people don't know what's going on. So these implementations often take a long time. Where this implement phase, if we've done all the previous phases, it's actually one of the easiest phases to do and deliver on time and on budget - where we typically aren't successful in that.

And then once we do that, once we've done the change, we're not done yet. We've got our final phase, which is 'inspect'. This is our phase five where we're reviewing how the change went, learning lessons, doing any refinements of what we've implemented. We may have missed something. We may have thought we've prepared as well as we could, and we found some issues. This is where we refine that. But then we also ensure that we've got measurements in place and that we've got people that are responsible for managing this ongoing so that we actually embed it and keep this sustainable for the future. It becomes part of our normal practice. It's not done until we've gone through this phase and with most operational changes, our changes to operational work methods for people, it's gonna take 90 days to really embed the habits and from what we've implemented those practices that people just do day by day is going to take someone to drive for the next 90 days to finalise as an embedded in the business. And hopefully understanding the this process it's a lot of work. But it's a lot less work than it is when we keep trying to do new initiatives by the basis of a strategy of each and every day. It's a lot less work than trying to roll back a poor implementation. It's a lot less work than, making things up as we go. That's the soft costs that we have in our businesses and why we feel so busy because we keep, we keep trying to do stuff over and over again without success. And so what we need to do is each and every initiative that we need, need to expect to follow this process. How long it takes will be different for each initiative and the level of change required. But this is part of that ongoing transformation. And so hopefully this awareness helps and we can slow down to speed up. If we're proactively doing this kind of thing and embedding it in our culture, overall our operational maturity is going to improve, not just from the initiatives that we deliver, but also just from the practices that we do at this level day in day out. Hopefully you can learn some things, hopefully you can identify where you're going wrong and then start to implement those new ways of doing it.