Similar to Shel Silverstein’s poem, “The Missing Piece,” companies often times roll transformational programs forward with a missing piece. All traditional components of the program checklist are addressed…Technology, PMO, Functional, Technical, Training, Support. What’s the missing piece? Listen to the thought leader and executive advisor, Wayne Burkan, explain how behaviors keep companies from realizing the full potential value of their programs.
Transcript
The transcript is close to a literal transcript of the spoken word. Please excuse any grammatical errors, spelling errors or break in the flow. The podcast is a non-scripted conversation with natural flow aimed to deliver value.
[00:00:02.090] – Intro
Welcome to PLM Evolution, your gateway to the forefront of digital thread and digital transformation and all things PLM. On this show, we’ll unpack the perspectives of industry pioneers, bringing you compelling conversations from the dynamic world of product innovation at today’s leading enterprises. Now, here’s your host, Patrick Sullivan.
[00:00:27.690] – Patrick Sullivan
Welcome to another episode. We have a special guest today. This is a gentleman that I met about six years ago when we did an enterprise program for Harley Davidson specializing in OCM. So if you’re tuning in today, we’re going to be learning from a master in the arts and crafts of OCM for everybody’s benefit. If you’re not familiar with the acronym of OCM, it’s organizational change management. And what that means is when you implement technology for a company, there are three major components from a high level. There’s people, process and technology. And OCM deals with all three aspects, but prioritizes the success of people embracing the new processes and the technology that’s being implemented. So, as I said before, wayne Birkin is a master. He’s been doing it for over 30 years. He’s an author. He’s going to be able to fill you in on his background so you have a more accurate picture. So without further ado, the one and only Wayne Burkan.
[00:01:48.770] – Wayne Burkan
And most people are saying, thank goodness he’s the only.
[00:01:53.010] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, thanks for joining. This has been something that’s been on my to do list and just thrilled to have you on, because once we release this, I want to title it the missing piece, because I feel like Archer Gray has been around for over 20 years now, and it’s always been technology and process and sometimes training. But this world of OCM, I never had a true appreciation for it until I was able to work on that Harley Davidson project with, you know, I’m still amazed. And it’s been six years, it still hasn’t settled in. So we’re thrilled to have you on the team at Archer Gray, leading the OCM practice. And today we’re just going to be sharing a lot of your knowledge with the audience.
[00:02:44.550] – Wayne Burkan
Glad to do it. Really excited. Thank you.
[00:02:47.830] – Patrick Sullivan
All right, great. So why don’t we step in and would you mind doing a little introduction of yourself and providing us some background about who you are and some highlights throughout your career?
[00:03:01.690] – Wayne Burkan
Sure, happy to do it. I’m a ce director right now of accelerated adoption OCM at ArcherGrey. As you had said, I started my career in finance. I have my MBA in international finance, and I worked at Ford in their controller’s office after that. I’m a slow learner sometimes, so it took me about seven years to figure out I don’t like finance, but I had the opportunity to work on some strategic plans and acquisition. And I learned that though I’m not a big fan of finance, I love strategy. And so I started working in strategy, and that led me to dealing with fundamental change around that. And I ultimately established my own company called Alternative Visions, which was about really helping organizations to make major shifts. I had that for 16 years. I sold it. I went to work at Capgemini and I sold it. Basically, I sold the book of business. I had built up a company, I had 23 people working for me. That was great, but I just wasn’t doing the change work anymore and I missed it. So I sold the company winter cap. Gemini. I worked in their North American OCM organization for twelve years. 18 months of that, I was head of the North American OCM practice. I left Capgemini after twelve years, went to work at Cognizant for three and a half years, and worked with their OCM practice as associate director. Enjoyed that very much. And then had a phone call from Blast from the past, from Patrick, who, as you mentioned, we had worked together, and you, silver tongue devil, you convinced me to entertain Arthur Gray, and I jumped ship, and I’ve been enjoying myself very much ever since.
[00:05:32.890] – Patrick Sullivan
Great. Well, we’re thrilled to have you on the team, Wayne, and thanks for giving a quick, high level summary. So, if you don’t mind, I kind of like to ask a core question and I’ll go on some tangents, but we’ll come back to Go center here. So you an MBA in international finance. By the way, my degree is in finance too, and now I’m in Business Development and marketing. So go figure. It’s important to understand numbers. How do you fall into OCM? How does that happen?
[00:06:13.670] – Wayne Burkan
So for me, I came in backwards, which actually ended up being a blessing. As I mentioned, I had worked on an acquisition, I worked on a couple of strategies. Many years ago, the COVID of Business Week had an article on the failure of strategic planning. And since I was into strategy, I thought, well, this is interesting. And as I read it, they listed dozens and dozens of failed strategic plans and a handful of what they called successful strategies. And lo and behold, two of those strategies that I worked on personally were viewed as successful. That was not the light that went on. It’s that I knew those strategies killed the companies. They were bad strategies. Technically, they were great. They were praised by Business Week, but I knew they did not work. They didn’t work. And for me, this was a kick in the head. It really was. Why, I asked myself, why is it that Business Week is praising these as successful strategies? And even those I knew really were good strategies? So I started exploring why strategy fails. And one of the main reasons why strategies fail is because they don’t take into account change. Even if the strategy is about change, it doesn’t adequately take into account changing about the same time. Sometimes the world just cooperates. And I met a fellow, his name is Joel barker. And Joel Barker is the person who popularized the phrase paradigm shift. These days, it’s a common phrase, but Joel had introduced it. He’d written books, did videos around paradigm shifting. And when I heard Joel speak, I said, this is exactly the missing piece. Not to steal the title of this podcast. So I started working with Joel. Long story short, phenomenal, phenomenal guy. And other people had come to him. He never accepted working with them. He did with me, and we became colleagues. So I had my company, he has his. But the condition was that I was to take paradigms in a different direction. So work with him, but not just mimic what he’s done. And the direction I took it was, how do you actually make it work? How do you make it happen? Now, today we talk about transformation, but back then, we talked about paradigm shifts. And what I spent a lot of time doing is investigating and delivering. How do you actually make these things change? That got me into change magic.
[00:09:41.770] – Patrick Sullivan
Wow. So in your brain, do you do a translation of paradigm shift to OCM? Are they synonymous in your head?
[00:09:52.350] – Wayne Burkan
In many ways they are. They really are a paradigm shift. I’m not going to get this too technical, but a paradigm shift is fundamentally it’s a set of rules that define boundaries and tell you how to be successful within a boundary. That’s a paradigm. So it’s rules that define boundaries, and they tell you how to be successful. When you change those rules or you change the boundary, you need to change those rules. That’s what the shift is about. Transformation is the same damn thing. Transformation is about fundamentally changing the rules of how we operate. So tomato, tomato, call it what you will, but in my mind, yes, when I hear transformation, I automatically understand this is really a challenge of shifting paradigms.
[00:10:51.970] – Patrick Sullivan
So I’m interested in these career shifts. You don’t exactly know how it’s going to end up, but you’re motivated by the passion. And then if you’re lucky enough to have a mentor along the way, they can help you navigate and bring some color to what is gray. Right. As you try to discover what it is. How did you continue to shape out OCM from your own perspective? Like getting the research done, redefining how it was looked at and perceived in the industry to be something of value that people actually want to engage on and prioritize budget for?
[00:11:39.870] – Wayne Burkan
Good question. The answer is, when I first started, I didn’t want to create the world overgrow until I took a look. I didn’t even know what OCM was at the time. But I took a look and said, okay, what have people done? How do they do it for making these changes? And so I spent a couple of years learning and practicing traditional, quote unquote, OCM. And I did that, and it worked to a degree. And I credit not any particular intelligence, just the fact that I came at OCM backwards. And I understood shifting before I learned OCM. I understood the fundamentals of change before I understood the practice of OCM. And as I started to apply it, I became increasingly dissatisfied because it didn’t seem to be doing what it needed to do. I worked on a project. It was called fix the basics. Not back to basics. Fix the basics. And this company, they wanted to sell a division, and they couldn’t. They had brought in SAP. The ERP. And two years after that, everything was off. Millions of dollars. Inventory was off. Our receivables. Everyone who looked at this company to purchase it walked away because everything was so wrong. So I was brought in to fix the basics, figure out what the problem is so they could get it back on track. And what I realized was that people were using this new technology, SAP, very powerful. Even back then, they were using it. But when I started to investigate, they were using it the way they had always done the work. So they took the new technology and applied it to the old way of doing things. And that’s very common because I’ve been doing something for five years and it seemed to work well. You give me a new technology, I’m going to continue to apply it in that way. And the result was, and this for me, was big. AHA. When you took this powerful technology and you applied it the way you’ve always done things, you don’t get the value of the technology. You actually are worse off than had. You never changed at all. And that was the problem with this company. And I began to realize that the big problems they had were how they were actually doing the work, what their behavior was. And when I realized that, I took a look at how traditional OCM was. And for me, it was a jaw dropping realization that most OCM is not about changing behavior. That’s not what it does. And I began become disenchanted with the way traditional OCM is practiced.
[00:15:22.150] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay, let me unpack this a little bit. So what jumped out at me there? So I’ve got some things circled here. Paradigm shift. Right? And you said that you backed into OCM from the idea of paradigm shift. And then your example that you just walked through, which thank you for going through that, was applying technology, new technology, then applying it in the old ways. And so you don’t get the value of new technology, and you’re even worse off. Can you explain why worse off?
[00:15:58.610] – Wayne Burkan
Sure. You’re worse off because before you were using the old technology, the old approach, whether it’s manual, whether it’s spreadsheet, no matter what it happens to be. But your approach was designed for that reality, for that technology at the time. When you bring a new technology in, all of a sudden you’re doing things as an example, people would take a look and they’d say, well, it’s asking me to fill out all of this. I’m not trying to screw up the process, but I can see a much better way of doing it based on what I did before. And so people, they don’t want to screw it up. They’re just trying to do their job as efficiently as possible, which means efficiently means I understood the way it was done, I’m going to do it that way. It’s comfortable, it feels right. And as a result, when they apply it in that way as an example, this is SAP. But any technology you can fill in the blanks, it requires a particular process, it requires particular way of doing the work. If it’s not done that way, if you’re lucky, it blows up when I said you’re lucky because at least that way you know something’s wrong. But the problem is all of it, it doesn’t blow up and it gives you a result, but the result is wrong and you don’t know it. And you’re worse off than had you just done it in a more antiquated previous technology approach.
[00:17:53.190] – Patrick Sullivan
If there’s one thing so far that we can just put out there on repeat for people to see, that explanation was very relevant, even to today, even though that was one of your jaw droppering AHA moments. Right. So now the other thing that you said prior to that explanation was you had mentioned jaw dropping realization and it was kind of the AHA moment in your shift from what you had been exposed to, from traditional OCM to starting to develop some of your proprietary methodologies and thought processes on how to approach this. So can we dive into that a little bit?
[00:18:35.670] – Wayne Burkan
You bet. For me, and it took a while for me to be able to articulate it, but the fundamental difference was the difference between acceptance and adoption. And what I began to realize is and that was the problem with that company, with FIXa Basics, they had implemented SAP, went live the life date on everything seemed to be working properly, and they celebrated and people had accepted the new technology, meaning they were using the new technology. What I realized was most OCM is traditional OCM is around acceptance, getting them to use it. But the problem in the fix, the basic example wasn’t that they were using it, but that they were using it in the way that it was intended by the business case when they brought in SAP. And so for me, part of that AHA, was the difference between acceptance of technology, that is, having it on my desk and using it, and adoption, which means using it in the way it was intended by the business case when I brought it in. And so I started working about what is that difference between acceptance and adoption. So now anyone who is listening to this who is an OCM practitioner. I need to apologize in advance for what I’m going to say. Most OCM I’ve learned is delusional. And when I say delusional, what do I mean? I mean, they produce communications that most people don’t consume, but we act as if it’s being consumed. So we continue to produce and are very proud of the communications we produce, even though it finds its way into the trash. They create what’s called change agent networks that ultimately end up being all about the network. And literally after a month, maybe 20% of the people who were tagged as change agents, that would make the difference, only 20% remain. And what happens? They continue to run the network, but with only 20% of the people. And the thing that kills me is if you then ask them, so what are those 20% of the people doing? The usual reaction is, well, I would hope that they’re doing X. Now think about it. You’re running this entire network, going through all the effort for one fifth of the people you thought you needed, and of those one fifth of the people, you don’t even know what they’re doing. And yet we continue to wonder. It’s delusional. Last example is something called the change impact assessment, which is a critical deliverable and activity for and I’ve seen this untold number of times, Patrick, where people will spend six weeks conducting a change impact assessment. The conclusion of which, and I’m not exaggerating, is we’ve got a lot of change. Now, if I’m paying the bill and I’ve got these consultants in there for six weeks doing this work, and the conclusion is, boy, there’s a lot of change going on, I have to ask myself, is this the best way to spend my money? So it’s delusional in the sense that traditional OCM continues to execute the activities, continues to produce the deliverables even though they really don’t produce the value. And so OCR is delusional. This is a problem with it. And that’s where I started really looking at what needs to be done different.
[00:23:22.770] – Patrick Sullivan
That’s really perceptive oftentimes. Well, do you know why you’re so analytical? Is your finance degree actually benefiting your OCM career?
[00:23:37.990] – Wayne Burkan
I won’t go that far. I don’t think I’m that analytical. What I think is that for whatever reason, just the way I’m wired, I tend to always look at the flip side. And that’s maybe why when I worked with Joel Barker, he agreed to work with me when others weren’t working with him because I looked at things, but I didn’t just mimic it. I always look at things critically and it’s served me well. It’s frustrating. Being an iconic class sometimes isn’t really very popular, but no, I’m not going to attribute it to my finance background. No, finance doesn’t necessarily make you makes you analytical, but not necessarily critical.
[00:24:34.310] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, well, on a hunch, typically I wait until after the podcast to determine what the title is going to be. But I projected this one titling. It the missing piece. And I think we just uncovered it in two reasons. One, the jaw dropping scenario of acceptance versus adoption. That whole exclamation, but then peeling that bannock for you to say, well, traditional OCM does. They have activities, they have deliverables, but oftentimes aren’t addressing the value, which is ultimately why you do it in the first place.
[00:25:14.790] – Wayne Burkan
Around the same time, I was doing research about OCM and what works and what doesn’t work. And what I discovered is this. And anyone who’s ever worked with OCM people, they’re always very quick to quote a statistic from Gartner that says that 75% of large projects, especially technology projects, but large projects fail 75%. Three out of four fail. And one of the main reasons they fail is a lack of OCM. So as you’d imagine, OCM people, they’re very quick to quote and promote that statistic. What they don’t tell you. And what I discovered is that according to McKinsey and others, 70% of OCM projects fail. 70%. Now, the answer is not to throw out OCM, but for me, that was if I needed a vindication, if I needed anything to say, you’re on the right track. Why is it that such a high percentage fail? So that also drove me to look at alternatives, not just what’s wrong, but what does it need to be? But I always found that that was a fascinating dichotomy.
[00:26:57.110] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, well, a phrase that I always kind of use, and there’s variations of it, is what’s true in the mind is true. Right? And so you kind of layer down two things to say, okay, 70% of projects fail because they don’t have OCM. And then you dive into that statistic and you say, well, how many OCM projects are successful? Because a lot of people put in what they would define OCM to be in their programs and project plans. But you’re right, which leads me to a question and something that, as I said at the beginning of this podcast, right. I didn’t have a true appreciation for OCM until we did that project together. And so do you think OCM is overlooked? It and there’s probably two questions to that, right? Do you think it’s overlooked, period. And then even when they say they have it incorporated into the program and yes, it’s very important, is it still overlooked?
[00:28:14.590] – Wayne Burkan
So the good question, I think the answer is yes. And in many cases, rightly. So the fundamental difference between traditional OCM and what I began to realize we needed is traditional OCM is around changing belief. And if you think about, like, one of the major traditional OCM methodologies is called prosai. And they have a methodology within that called Adcar, which basically says if you are aware of the chain, you understand the chain, you are motivated to change. And you know how then you will change. And at face value, that seemed to make sense, but then I’d ask myself, for example, over 90% of dieting fails. So let’s talk about organizational transformation. Let’s talk about one personal transformation. Over 90% of diets fail. Are you motivated to diet? Well, if you were motivated, you wouldn’t do it. Do you understand how to diet? And there are tens of thousands of dieting books out there, and videos and YouTube. It goes on and on. So people, they meet all of the requirements for traditional OCM, say, procy, but what happens a week, a month, two months after they stop? And this is the same for any New Year’s resolution. So on a personal level, if you think about it being motivated, understanding why you need to do it, understanding how to do it, is targeted towards belief. And it’s not enough. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. What I learned was belief doesn’t result in change, especially around transformation. Change in behavior is necessary for transformational change. And that, to me, to answer your question, is it overlooked? It is, but not incorrectly so. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to OCL practitioners who end up literally being thrown out of an engagement, and they shake their heads and they just say, you know what? They just don’t understand. And I’ve learned they do understand. They understand that if I’m spending money and I’m not getting value for the money, it’s called overhead. And a lot of OCM is overlooked because it’s correctly perceived as overhead. Meaning they have activity, they’re doing things, they’re delivering stuff, but it’s not resulting in the ample of change. Impact assessment, six weeks of effort, and the result is you to tell me we have a lot of change. That’s great example of overhead, and you should overlook it. So the answer is, yes, it is overlooked, but those are the reasons. And as a result, people will either dismiss OCM in total or they reduce it to communications and training. And communications and training, in the same way we discussed before, don’t result in chain, but it’s the most visible. So we have to tell people about this. So we’ll have communications, we need to teach them how to do it. So we’ll have training. The result is it’s still not enough to make you successful. But in many, many cases, OCM is relegated to that. So it’s either completely overlord or we just pick and choose small parts of it and execute it,
[00:32:48.470] – Patrick Sullivan
Back to that point on the activity of the deliverables. Yeah, that’s been talking I’m reading a book, I’m not sure if you’ve read it. It’s called atomic habits. You heard of that from James Clear. The caption is an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. And one of the things that I just read the other day in there, essentially so I’m a goal oriented type of person, right? And so I set a goal and then I try to work to achieve that and imagine my surprise when I was reading. He basically says, if your goals based, it’s a loser’s game because you have a streak of motivation to establish the goal and decide that you want to do the things. But if the goal is too far out in the future, just as you said on the OCM side, you have to create new habits and be disciplined enough to be able to sustain it long enough to achieve the goal. Because oftentimes goals are out in the distance and when you don’t see the result in four to eight weeks, you basically stop doing it and you resort to your
[00:34:08.370] – Wayne Burkan
That’s exactly right. Which is a corollary to the old definition of insanity, doing the same thing and expecting to get a different result. And in effect, we do that. The reality is, the thing about transformation is which makes it unique. Transformation is not just a lot of change. You’ve got enhancement where you’re incrementally building on what you’ve already done. And people love enhancement because it is incremental. It means that I’m going to get more for my investment if I build on my education, if I build on my training. It’s not a hard sell. It’s a lot of benefit for not much pay. It’s a good deal. Transformation, by definition, is fundamentally changing the rules, fundamentally changing what’s done. And when you do that, there is pain. It’s axiomatic, not for everybody, not for the same degree, but there is pain. And so, to your point, if you’re doing the activity, you’re not getting the result. You see the pain, you don’t see the gain, you drop it. And fundamentally transformation. So what you’re reading I’ve not read the book, but I’m sure I’d agree with it, that fundamentally you need to change your habit. What you’ve been doing for people don’t embrace a habit. They don’t adopt the habit because it doesn’t work for them. The reason why it becomes a habit is because there’s reinforcement to say this is the right thing to do and we continue to do it when conditions change. What I was doing before that worked may not work in the future. That’s what transformation is about. But that means I’ve got to change the habit and I’ll come back to fix the basics. Well, the problem was they were using the new technology with the old habits and that doesn’t work. So to me, OCM should really be about adoption, which means changing the fundamental habits, the fundamental behaviors. And that requires something more than simply making people aware and motivated.
[00:37:01.750] – Patrick Sullivan
Yeah, that’s well said. After he shocked me with the goal thing because I was personally offended. That’s the guy, he’s constantly reinforcing it and you said it, he’s like incremental change. Right. 1% improvement per day. And what he’s really focusing on are changing your systems because ultimately you have to create new habits. Right. And to your point, it’s uncomfortable. And he has all these different scenarios where you do an incremental change. One in how you talk, two in how you prepare. So when, for instance, just and everybody can relate to this, getting up in the morning to go exercise, your entire outfit is at the bottom of your bed. So the first thing that you do are you’re putting on your socks and your shoes. Well, maybe not in that order, but you get the picture. Changing your systems and environments in order to reinforce the behavior, to ultimately reach the goal long term and deliver value. As your point is.
[00:38:22.530] – Wayne Burkan
What it comes down to is, for example, it doesn’t mean that you don’t communicate, but understanding that most communication is not consumed, that people are very busy, they’ve got 100 emails or more a day and that they’re not going to it used to be you’d write a newsletter, people would read the newsletter. Now, I was with a client, we did a little experiment. They really wanted a newsletter. We put it into SharePoint where we were able to track the views. And we had 1500 target stakeholders and there were like 22 people who absolutely reading this newsletter, and I’m sure they were on the project team. So the question is not send out more newsletters. That’s again, good definition of insanity, but rather ask how do I communicate differently to get people to want to console this? Or for example, if you’re going to do a change impact assessment, it doesn’t mean abandon doing change impact assessments. It means fundamentally change. You need to understand the impact of the change, but you need to understand it in a way that’s actionable that’s going to be able to translate into behavioral change. And so those are just a couple of examples, but I develop accelerated adoption, the way that we deliver change management all around this fundamental behavioral shift approach. And it’s a different way of looking at metrics, it’s a different way of looking at communication. It’s a different way of looking at change management and strategy, which gets me up in the morning. I’ve been doing this for 30 years. And you know what? I’m still excited about it. I really am, because very quick anecdote. I used to be a professional speaker, among other things. And so I was doing a keynote for a company and they had two keynote speakers, myself and Edward Devin. So we were doing the typical mic check and stuff that you do before an event begins. And so I went out to dinner with Ed Deming, and again, this man is a god in the quality movement. And he was like 92 years old. And I said to him, I said, Ed, I said, you’ve been doing this for so long, you’re 92 years old, why are you still doing it? And in this really nice restaurant, he starts banging his hand on the table, his fist on the table, saying, because people just don’t know they and it’s that passion. Which I love. I love this guy. And it was that passion that gets me up in the morning. So I do this because people still don’t get it. Change management can be so powerful, but in so many cases, it’s just over here.
[00:41:43.090] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, I certainly hear the passion in your voice around this and just I do feel when you’re passionate about something, you are able to see things differently. And you can tell that you gravitated through this to be a vocation in your life and not just a job. So relating this to digital transformation through the eyes of, you know, we talked about OCM being overlooked and we dove into that. Maybe this is the same question and we can skip over it, but maybe you’ve got a little spin on it. Is OCM the missing piece for digital transformation? And how we look at it?
[00:42:28.110] – Wayne Burkan
It is and I’ll answer it a little different way, take a look at PLM. PLM is an incredible enabling technology, and not just allows, but encourages collaboration between groups that have not collaborated before. It takes something which is a sticky, a broken process, and makes that process work infinitely better when behaviors shift. Can you implement PLM without a change of behavior? Yes, you can. But the result is if you think about the investment you make, the project duration, the cost of the project duration, what people go through and if all they’re doing is incrementally, being a little more efficient then any casual view of ROI is going to say, even when the project’s successful, we’re not getting the return we expected to get, because people are still behaving the way they used to behave. Pre PLN. And it is the missing piece. It basically says that any trans by definition, any transformational technology should help us to perform at a different level in a fundamentally different way. The key term there is enable us to. That’s what the technology can do. But if the behaviors don’t shift in accordance with that, we bring in the tech and we don’t get the bang for the buck. And you can go take a look at ERP supply chain transformation, PLM. It doesn’t matter. All of those are transformational technologies that don’t transform business. If behavior doesn’t also shift as well, that makes OCM the missing piece.
[00:44:43.610] – Patrick Sullivan
That was a great summary right there. All of those transformational technologies that don’t transform behavior, that’s good.
[00:44:56.110] – Wayne Burkan
I should probably shut up now, because it’s all downhill from there.
[00:45:02.370] – Patrick Sullivan
So with that statement, let’s talk about money. One, probably over 90% of the time, people that I interact with don’t budget appropriately, period. Typically, they don’t have enough budget for doing things the way that they should be done, right? Budget can limit scope and whole bunch of other things in order to meet the objectives. So you have to adjust timeline, duration, all of those fun things. So if you could have an ideal mix and somebody said Wayne and we know that you’re the official answer in all this because you do have an MBA with your international business in finance. So if you could get an ideal mix of budget and let’s just do people process technology and for this exercise just call people OCM, okay? And then process technology. So those three buckets, is it 33, 33, 33 in terms of allocating budget or is there a different mix there?
[00:46:12.470] – Wayne Burkan
No, it’s a different mix. Gartner had said at one point, I don’t know in recent years if they’ve changed, but at one point they said the right percentage of a budget for a project for OCM is 15% project. And understand training is part of that and training is a big chunk and that is absolutely necessary. That said, if a company will dedicate 15%, what that means is that is usually sufficient to be able to pay for the training and the organizational chain. Now again, as a rules of thumb, probably have as many exceptions as they have compliance, but I would say 15% in most cases is enough to cover what training you’re going to need. But more importantly, the OCM part. OCM does not require the same level of budget or people commitment as a project team would require, say, for example, for PLM implementation. So it should never be equal to the reality is changing behavior does take some time, it does take some effort, but 15% really should cover it. There have been cases where maybe it moves closer to that 20% mark, but that’s unusual. Usually 15% is
[00:48:00.660] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay and what scenarios? Like why was it 20%? Somebody just sold it internally better?
[00:48:06.250] – Wayne Burkan
No, it’s usually when you’re talking about, for example, global projects where changing behavior is all about touch, you’re not going to get people to change their behavior by just sending stuff out and trying to get to their mind space. So if a project is a very complex project, if it’s a global project, if it is the other piece which can also work against this, which is kind of the unknown, and that is just how ingrained is the status quo? If the status quo is extremely engraved in people’s behavior, then it may take more to get them to begin to shift to alter that behavior. So those are the types of variables that will push it up. But again, I would say that’s the exception.
[00:49:11.900] – Patrick Sullivan
Okay, how do you sell it within an organization? So many folks that listen to this podcast are actively managing programs or they’re planning and they’re trying to fight and compete for budget within their organization. How do they sell the 15% to 20% budget allocation for OCM?
[00:49:37.460] – Wayne Burkan
Understand that convincing people we need OCM is not the big problem. If when you sit down and then start to do your budget, figuring out what your budgeting is, OCM is usually cut. So I would say OCM is probably included in 80% of projects at one point. But by the time the budgeting, which is, I think, part of your question, by the time budgeting is done, OCM has now been pulled out out of that project. The reality is OCM is a misnomer. I mean, you’re not managing change. Change is change. It’s going to happen. You can help prepare an organization for changing, not managing it. OCM as a terminology, as a profession, I think is a misnomer in many cases. What I’ll do is I work with a company, and I don’t talk about OCM. I talk about risk reduction, risk identification and risk reduction. And anybody who’s in business, anybody who is project management, understands and appreciates risk. Ultimately, what OCM is about is reducing the non technical risks of a program. And when you talk about that, it becomes especially for people who are I’ll use the derogatory term bean characters. I was one for seven years. But when you’re looking at that, you’re looking at, is this necessary? And the idea of and this happens a lot. You know, this where you’ll have people say, you know what, they’re just going to do what we tell them to do. And based on that, we don’t need OCM. Well, if you think about behavior, they’re going to do what we tell them to do. That never works. You get compliance, but you get maladoption. You get people taking bits and pieces, and I will comply with what you see. So I’ll comply visibly, but I’ll keep on reverting back to what I’m comfortable with, those old habits. So I talk about it as risk, risk identification, risk reduction. And at its core, what is the big, if not the biggest? One of the biggest risk is that we’re not going to apply the technology in the way that was intended, and therefore the business case doesn’t get realized. And that’s fundamentally how in my life, how you sell it very quickly. I was working with a client, and the CIO thought OCM was a four letter word. He thought it was a crop. And I wanted to convince him to do this thing called a change impact assessment. I never used the term. I just said, we want to go in and do a nontechnical risk assessment. He said, Great, let’s do it. And when I did it, this guy literally walked around for a week with the report under his arm, holding that report. If I mentioned it was OCN, never would have happened. But risk reduction is, in my mind, a very effective way of selling OCM
[00:53:18.030] – Patrick Sullivan
I mean, that’s sage advice. Obviously, you’ve dealt with the conversation. By the way, do you identify with OCM? I mean, I know that society may force you to identify with it, but do you identify with it?
[00:53:36.150] – Wayne Burkan
I don’t, because, again, OCM fundamentally is perceived, as you do the end. I’m talking about no matter what consulting firm. That’s typically how it’s practiced, what you do and what you deliver. We did this. We delivered this OCM program is done and successful whether change comes out of that or not. So I don’t I use OCM because people there’s a recognition with that good or bad. But to your point, sometimes that recognition does you more harm than good.
[00:54:15.277] – Wayne Burkan
Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:15.970] – Patrick Sullivan
Well, I’ve got a lot of notes and I’ve got a lot of asterisks and I’ve got a lot of arrows connecting things. There’s been a tremendous amount of things that I’ve learned that I would love to just highlight, and each one could be its own chapter. And I guess I’ll just share some of the things that pop out for the audience in case they’re tuning in at different times. One is this idea of acceptance versus adoption. And then two are, to your point of consulting firms need to show that they did the work and that it was delivered successfully. But your challenging question of was value delivered? Did you actually change behaviors? And I think those are three big themes that are kind of jumping around in my mind. And there’s a whole bunch of conversations and directions that we can go, but I’ll hit the pause button for now and I suspect that we’ll be having other conversations. And if anybody wants to learn more, feel free to reach out to us at info@archergrey.com. You can also find me, patrick.sullivan@archergrey.com, and as well as Wayne. wayne.burkan@archergrey.com are ways to find us. If you want to ask more questions or learn more about ArcherGrey’s accelerated adoption methodology and framework. So with that one final question, wayne, any parting words of advice?
[00:56:21.370] – Wayne Burkan
Well, I just say the more a program is transformational, the more it’s going to involve pain of change. That’s the definition. And the fundamental question is, why should people endure this pain? And if we don’t, because there’s pain there, that pain is going to be a disincentive for people to change, to really change. That’s a behavioral anchor. So if any program that you implement, you should always be asking yourself the question, how is this accomplishing the necessary pain to get us on the other side where transformation promises to take us?
[00:57:13.930] – Patrick Sullivan
Well said. Well said. Well, I’ve appreciated you prioritizing the time to talk with us and share all the different ideas today. And I’m looking forward to continuing to work with you on programs and helping clients successfully implement change and get the value that they’re after on all these programs. So thank you for all your time and knowledge and wisdom. Appreciate it, Wayne.
[00:57:42.330] – Wayne Burkan
My pleasure. I enjoyed it. Thanks a lot.
[00:57:43.750] – Patrick Sullivan
All right, thanks for joining us on this episode. Catch us on the next episode. And if you want any information, additional information, feel free to reach out to us again at either info@archergrey.com, and that’s with an E or patrick.sullivan@archergrey.com. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.