Project to follow up and measure success of a significant process change

THE previous three columns introduced this series focused on projects with the mandate to put in place significant changes to the processes currently used by the organization, or to introduce a new process. The changes could be something needed in an established company, or maybe in a startup which is growing and now needs more formalized processes. While it is certainly possible to ask one project team to handle a single project to plan for the change, design and implement it, and follow up afterwards to determine the success of the new process, we have found it more productive to examine the stages individually. We have viewed that by establishing separate projects for the stages of the process change. The intention in this column is to discuss projects with the mandate to follow up after a significant process change has been put in place to determine whether or not the goals for the change have been met. For this project we will use a new example to illustrate he concepts.