The Technical Plan
Identify the Gaps and Methodologies to Transform
If the vision tells you where you are going, and leadership tells you who is taking you there and what skills they will need, the technical plan tells you how you will get there. In short, a technical plan addresses how you will close the gap between the desired vision for the organization and the current reality of the organization. While that sounds very simple, there are so many different change techniques and methodologies that often technical plans are sources of confusion and not sources of clarity. This sometimes results in organizations either not creating technical plans or changing their technical plans too quickly. This chapter will provide some general guidelines for how technical plans should be created.
There is a famous saying in business circles: If you do not know where you are going, all roads will take you there. There is another saying of equal fame: keep it simple, stupid (affectionately called the KISS principle). It is these two ideas that are best kept in mind when developing the technical plan associated with organizational change. The first saying says that organizations need a road map to chart direction and monitor progress. Without a road map, the organization could end up anywhere or nowhere. And in today’s competitive environment, when anyone at any time can become your competition, you put your organization at risk without this type of planning. The second saying advocates for simplicity. The management of change should not be more complicated than the actual change being implemented.
Recall from our last chapter that we advocated for paying equal attention to management and leadership (the polarities). However, if you read popular books on the subject, it seems as though scholars are suggesting that management skills often stand in the shadow of leadership skills. In Jim Collins’s seminal book Good to Great, the competent manager is listed as level 3, while the effective leader is listed as level 4.1 The numeric ranking seems to imply that the effective leader has reached a higher level than the competent manager. While the ranking of management below leadership is inaccurate, both are needed skills in making organizational transformation happen. It is similar for strategic planning and implementation. Strategic planning includes SWOT analysis, which assesses the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities for better results, and threats to the current organization; visioning; and selecting big, hairy, audacious goals (BHAGs), while implementation involves resource allocation, tactics, and action plans. Leadership skills align more closely with strategic planning, while management skills align more closely with implementation. The fact is that you have to have both an effective leader and a capable manager to be successful in the long run. Leaders set the direction for the organization and inspire people to want to overcome the barriers and obstacles between what exists today and what can exist in the future. Energizing the organization to create the future is probably about 70% of the work involved in change efforts. Wanting to change and actually changing are not the same. Making a change a reality is about the details involved in implementation. It is about resources, timelines, and budgets. It is about being effective and efficient. It is about management. Again, successful change efforts require two types of skills—leadership skills and management skills.
In this chapter we focus on two key aspects of a technical plan: identifying the gap between the current reality of the organization and its vision and identifying the tools and methodologies needed to close the gap.