Workplace Engineering

The failure to meet unrealistic expectations can have a huge detrimental impact on a business partnership. Business partnerships and outsourcing relationships in particular are complex, lengthy, involve considerable change and require both personal and organizational investment to be successful. Lack of understanding, over ambitious promises and lack of preparation and rigor can all lead to expectations that are not matched by reality.

Knowledge, preparation and communication are the answers to unrealistic expectations. Developing a deep and structured knowledge of your processes, needs, performance requirements and your partner capabilities drives realistic criteria. Deep preparation leaving little to chance ensures that scenarios are thought about and surprises are reduced. On-going, honest and clear communications ensures that everyone is on the same page and there is little room for unrealistic expectations.

Unless there are clear tangible and intangible benefits from the new arrangements there can be a significant tendency to revert to old ways of doing things.

Investing the time and energy to make the partnership and the relationships with in it are the only prescriptions for ensuring that the change holds and continues to deliver value. Using Prosci’s ADKAR stages of change can provide an effective gauge of personal and organizational progress in a transition

• Awareness - Identified that a change is coming
• Desire - A willingness to change (have decided to support the new over the old)
• Knowledge - knowing how to change
• Ability - implementing new skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement - maintaing the change once it has occurred

(Adapted from “Employee’s Survival Guide to Change by Jeffrey M. Hiatt)

It’s quite a time consuming and resource intensive process to find and transition in new ways of doing things. It is the small interventions all the way through that ensure that the change becomes as embedded as the old way of doing things.