Group/Individual: Facilitating Structures

Group/Individual Level

Facilitating structures - Resources

When implementing innovation and technical changes, you are sure to need additional resources above and beyond what is required for your steady-state operations. It is a law of the physical universe that things at rest tend to stay and rest, and things in motion tend to stay in motion. By definition, therefore, it takes energy (e.g., time, money, people) to make change. Quite frequently, one of your most difficult tasks will be to convince senior managers who are looking at this implementation only at the strategic/organisational level, of the group and individual-level realities of the project in terms of the necessary costs.

We will consider three topics at this point. Information on each can be accessed by clicking on the following listing or by scrolling down the page:

Underestimating needed resources
You will be very likely to under-estimate the amount of effort involved, especially if this is one of the first times you are implementing a certain innovation or technical change, or are doing it in an area with which you are not very familiar.

As mentioned in relation to change style and the scale of changes, large-scale, deep changes can sometimes take years to implement. Even moderate change consumes significant organisational resources. For example, a pilot project to re-engineer the order fulfillment process within a 250-person firm, took us six months, six full-time equivalents, $25,000 in fees for a consultant/facilitator and training, 35 working group/steering committee meetings, a three-day residential conference with six representatives from three customers and six company people from satellite locations, and a score of meetings with various senior management champions and sponsors, just to get through to the group/individual level persuasion, decision, commitment stage just prior to actual roll-out of the changes. The roll-out of the organisational restructuring and electronic data interchange systems to eliminate invoices and link customers directly into company information systems took another year.

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Categories of needed resources
The following listing is intended to help you consider all potential sources of major expense when detailing your estimates and planning:

People: Be sure to think through the required skills, availability issues, duration of tasks and start dates; remember both direct and indirect/overhead costs of people in categories such as secretarial support, work group members, steering committee members, consultants, legal, other support personnel (e.g., a CAD operator to draw up diagrams), etc.
Non-people: Hardware, software, equipment, facilities, venues for meetings, meetings, communications, information, material, time, capital.

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Improving estimation of needed resources
There are several ways in which you can improve your ability to estimate the actual costs of needed resources [based on Roman, D. D. (1986). Managing projects. New York: Elsevier]:

Break down work segments into manageable modules. Trying to estimate the resources needed for a large and complicated project is difficult. It is easier to estimate the resources needed for smaller modules and then to add the costs of the pieces together to form an estimate of the total project.
Identify work segment resource requirements. Once you have identified each of the work segments, you can then determine the resource requirements for each piece across a number of categories such as human resources, facilities and equipment, external support, and direct-costs.
Provide slack for unexpected problems and changes. As discussed in relation to managing risks, when conducting detailed implementation planning, expect the unexpected to happen, and budget for it. Keep a look-out for inaccurate planning and omission of work segments in original estimates. Even the best, most experienced planners cannot foresee every contingency. If the project is expected to continue for a year or more, realistically allow for inflation as well.
Check past experience on technically related projects for resource cost estimation guidelines and benchmarks. It is very likely that someone, somewhere has done what you are trying to do. Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour. If a project similar to yours conducted in similar circumstances took someone else two years, with four full-time equivalents, scores of meetings and workshops, etc., it is a very good bet that you will not be able to do it with 50% less resources.

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