Notes from the implementation side of employee experience #3

A bit of mess can be a good sign

I get suspicious of projects where everybody agrees with everything. Not because I enjoy an argument, and I'm definitely not suggesting that the secret to a successful employee experience platform implementation is getting Comms, IT and HR into a room and letting them fight it out. I've seen enough projects to know that a smooth implementation doesn't necessarily tell you much about what happens afterwards.

Some of the easiest launches I've worked on have gone exactly to plan. Tasks all ticked off, project team happy, launch day comes and goes without any drama and everybody gets to breathe a sigh of relief. Then, six weeks later... insert tumbleweed gif here. Equally, I've worked on projects that have felt considerably messier, taken more effort and involved far more disagreement, but I've come away from the meetings feeling much better about where they're heading.

I'm not talking about the "nobody knows what's going on" kind of mess. I've been there as well, and those projects normally come with enough warning signs to fill a risk register. I mean the kind where people are actually willing to challenge each other. IT draws a firm boundary and Comms pushes back. A senior stakeholder doesn't like a design and explains why. Somebody who actually does the job you're designing something for tells you that it makes no sense in real life. Here, at least you know what people think.

I've found myself reading that dynamic pretty much from the first meeting I have with a project team. It can be obvious; two people strongly disagree and neither is particularly interested in pretending otherwise. It can be subtle; someone's tone changes, somebody suddenly goes quiet, one person answers every question, or someone's body language is saying something very different to the words coming out of their mouth. None of that appears on a project plan, but you do notice it. A project team  at cross purposes in the first meeting doesn't necessarily worry me. Everyone smiling and  nodding when it's obvious they don't agree absolutely does.

I've worked on projects where there was plenty of disagreement along the way. We changed things, went backwards on things and occasionally took far longer than anyone would have liked to reach a decision. It could be frustrating, but the important bit was that people explained why they disagreed and listened when someone else did the same. Eventually, we'd normally get somewhere everyone could live with. Those projects weren't always particularly quick or neat, but the team worked. Sometimes taking longer over something just means people are actually thinking about it properly.

The quieter projects can worry me more. They're the ones where every decision seems to need to travel upwards before it can come back down again, nobody quite feels able to answer a question, and you end up in meetings with cameras off, microphones muted and very little reaction to something that's supposedly going to change how hundreds or thousands of colleagues communicate. You ask something, get silence, and eventually someone says they'll take it away. Then it disappears up the chain for a week. Nobody's arguing, but you're not really getting much to work with either.

That's normally when finding the right people becomes even more important. They aren't always the most senior people in the organisation either. Sometimes it's a leader who other leaders actually listen to, but it can just as easily be somebody who's built up a lot of respect from doing the job for years. It's also why I've always preferred champion groups that actually represent the organisation. I don't want ten carefully selected people who already think the project is brilliant. Give me the frontline colleague who's slightly sceptical and willing to say, "Nobody on my shift is going to do that." I want to know why they think that.

One of the best examples I've seen came from someone who'd spent years working on the floor before moving into a project role. They knew the organisation from the bottom up and, crucially, knew how people actually worked rather than how we might assume they worked from looking at a process.

We were designing a Time Off process and the first version was perfectly sensible. Half day, full day or a longer period. Pretty standard really, except what we had designed didn’t fit working patterns at all. A casual worker might need to book off a single 30-minute lesson. "Half day" also didn't really mean much when shift patterns varied massively across the organisation. Somebody might need 8am–4pm off, while somebody else might need an hour. It was only because someone with that operational experience challenged the original thinking that we stopped and changed it.

That's the sort of challenge I want. Without it, we could have built something that worked perfectly well on paper and was annoying for the people actually expected to use it.

I keep coming back to being people-led for exactly that reason. Obviously project plans, governance and process matter; I'm an Implementation Manager, I'm not throwing the project plan in the bin. But none of those things can tell you what a normal Tuesday looks like for the person whose working day you're trying to make better. Sometimes the person you most need to hear from isn't the most senior person in the meeting. It's the person who's actually done the job.

There is a difference between ‘good mess’ and ‘bad mess’, though. Sometimes a project is messy because decisions keep getting reopened, nobody knows who owns what, IT and Comms appear to be operating in different universes and something suddenly becomes a massive problem two days before launch despite apparently being sorted three months ago. There's nothing particularly clever about this type of mess.

For me, the difference is whether the disagreement actually gets you anywhere. People can disagree quite strongly and still reach a decision. They can challenge each other and still move forward. The problem is when you have the same conversation five times and nobody is any clearer on who is making the call.

You also have to accept that sometimes an organisation isn't going to move as far as you'd like it to. You can challenge something, explain why you think another way would work better, involve champions and bring different voices into the room, but ultimately it's their organisation. I've probably got better over time at recognising when another push might genuinely improve something and when I'm just going to spend a lot of energy trying to change a decision that isn't going to change. You've got to take the rough with the smooth.

So yes, a little bit of mess can be a very good sign during an implementation. I'd be much more concerned if I'd spent three months on a project and nobody had challenged anything. Either you've somehow assembled the world's most perfectly aligned project team, or somebody isn't saying what they actually think.

I'd rather know which one it is before launch.