Relaunch Your Career

Your analysis of the organisation will have raised several potential scenarios for change. Urgent remedial actions should be agreed and carried out, but the options for longer-term change need to be whittled down by looking at achievability and desirability for the organisation. There also needs to be ‘stomach’ for the changes proposed – a cultural readiness that will create a groundswell of support.

Prioritise the options by looking at aspects such as:

• Ease of implementation of this change, including cost
• Level of pay-off (return) from making this change
• Organisational readiness for this change
• Concerns that this change might raise in the organisation
• Barriers to this change, and whether any of them are ‘killer concerns’.

Based on your prioritisation, create a shortlist of no more than two – your favoured option, and one more that you could reasonably deliver. Discuss them with your boss, and decide which to flesh out. It could be that you will need to create a business case or white paper for what you want to do, and you will not have the bandwidth to create more than one – or possibly two – of these.

Deciding your approach

Next, rough out your approach to the task ahead. You need to consider:

• The scope of the project (not just what’s in scope, but also what’s out)
• Any assumptions you’ve had to make
• Your approach – what you will do in which order, including how you will generate support and momentum
• What already exists (structures, processes, resources initiatives) you can build on
• Dependencies –human, financial and capital resources that you need to make this happen
• Sponsorship – senior-level buy-in including (but not limited to) your own management line
• Schedule – when will you start and how long will it take
• Milestones – what will you deliver along the way?
• Risks and barriers – what might go wrong, and how you would handle it?
• Measurement – how will you know when you’ve succeeded?
• Reporting – to whom and how will you report progress?

Once you have the answers to all these questions, one way to gain support and sign off for your ideas is to present them in the form of a business case.