What if my needs change mid-project?
"Things are evolving so fast, we don't know what our needs will be in the next (week, month, quarter)."
Things change - and the best laid plans may not always work with what the reality is in your organization. Nothing exemplified this better than the almost overnight onset of the COVID pandemic in March of 2020.
Leaders often need support in rapidly-changing environments. Maybe it is in Communications - staying on pulse with the employee base and delivering appropriate and timely messages from Leadership that address both the concerns of the organization and the vision for navigating through to the future. Maybe you are experiencing significant growth, and the operational processes which worked at last quarter's volumes are bursting at the seams today. Maybe you have hired new team members, and are not sure how you would bring them up to speed on projects that you have already started.
Is not knowing what the future holds a credible reason to postpone acting on what is changing in the organization today?
In the past three quarters, AJC has pivoted project plans and Scopes of Work to adjust to the evolving needs of our clients. Here are three examples of what happened and how we handled the situation:
An urgent directive from the Leadership Team affecting 7,000+ employees took immediate priority mid-stream in a Change Management project
We immediately pivoted our Change Management Plan to help the client’s team with Communications for the urgent directive, allowing them to focus on helping their teams through the change; using “Minimum Viable Product” Sprint-like durations to respond in real time to the shift in needs of the organization
Rapid growth increased the need for immediate evaluation of "mid-term" process changes and a revised strategy for evaluation of a new system
Our team quickly expedited our process improvement "Impact-Ease" prioritization list and met with the client to modify our systems evaluation approach to meet their needs, stretching our budget to allow for their decreased ability to participate in the short term, and working with individual leaders to implement quick-turn efficiency gains
Hiring a new Executive just before the project completed
We used our remaining budget to bring the new Executive up-to-speed on the work that we completed, the process we used, and added three weeks to our timeline to ensure the Exec was on board (without adding budget!) before we completed the work and handed it off to the client's team.
Sometimes just getting started is the hardest part! Because AJC is flexible in our approach, and we typically offer support on a part-time basis, we are comfortable with quick changes. We provide an Account Manager for each project, at no additional fee to our clients, to ensure that we are able to meet your expectations and can talk through changes in scope with you.