Change Management - Its more important to plan when to finish than get going in a hurry

Change costs money, late change costs a lot of money. Think through the implications of change.

It is usual for management teams to deliberate long periods before approving requirements, budgets and timescales.

This puts further pressure on the implementation as many projects will have fixed expected end dates. Having made the decision to proceed leaders expect the solution to be implemented quickly. At this point contributors goes into a frenzy to demonstrate their commitment to the project. Not so if you have an execution risk mind-set.

As demonstrated in the table, the cost of rectifying errors becomes exponentially higher as a project progresses. Typically, this is done by going down the wrong path and having to re-work the solution. Therefore, there is great benefit in eliminating as many errors up-front as possible.

The execution risk mind-set says, before committing substantial resources, make sure we are doing the right things first. Thereafter you can switch focus to doing things right. Taking time to think through what needs to be done at the beginning of an implementation will save you some serious cost and time penalties later in the day.

It could, however, cost you political capital in the short term, but you can recoup political capital over the medium to longer term as your project starts to perform strongly. (see next section).

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