In this article, Adrian Reed shares some practical tips and techniques for ensuring that process changes are adopted and successfully 'bed in' to organisations. He discusses communication, building buy-in as well as ensuring that we 'build it right' in the first place.

Imagine the scene: You've designed beautiful processes that are efficient and effective. You've implemented a nice, efficient 'workflow management' IT system to allow the work to flow seamlessly through the organisation. There is an automatic 'dashboard' that reports on the health of processes. You walk away, happy that you've delivered benefit.

Then, three months later you return to measure the benefits and you find that stakeholders are doing everything they can to avoid the formal process.  They are using paper files, rather than the formal system. They have developed their own Excel spreadsheets and Access databases to hold data, and the 'official' process seems to have evaporated. You scratch your head in dismay!

This fictional situation might sound extreme, but I'm sure we've seen similar patterns play out in our organisations, where we come across ‘formal’ processes that were never adopted. Situations like this can be costly and risky, and they can be avoided.  

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