Having established the strategic positioning, program design and development, and with key procurement complete, we moved to the major phase of implementation.
It has been mentioned elsewhere that 66 per cent of programs and projects fail and 33 per cent succeed. Of those that fail most are classified as failures of implementation. I have to say, though, unless we had done the work in the prior phases as described above, the task and risks of implementing would be much greater.
Having said that, there are still ‘bucket loads’ of implementation risks, so we need overt strategies to address these:
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Continuing strong governance and accountability arrangements. I already mentioned the Change Program Steering Committee. Below this, the program design and delivery has been the responsibility of a single integrated Change Program team. When we delivered tax reform we did it in a very devolved way. The different revenue product areas had the major responsibilities for introducing the change, including business processes and systems, and, whilst we had an overall Reform Program Office for planning and monitoring, the approach was very decentralised. We have taken a very different approach this time. We have brought the Accenture, business area and IT people into the one team, quite a large team of around 500 people, to form a new Tax Office division for the duration of the program.
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Formal program and project management methodology. Obvious in a sense, but not always easy to make work in an organisation where very large scale program management is not a way of life. We decided to essentially use the methodologies of our program partner and our independent assurer.
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Formal stage gates. The Government has recently introduced the requirement for formal stage gate type approaches in significant projects. This project is not subject to these Government arrangements because it was committed before they came into effect. However we have in any event incorporated a total of ten key stage gates throughout the program. We effectively have a go/no go decision at each of these, and get an independent assessment of how we are going, as well as a self assessment.
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Staying outcomes-focussed and realising benefits. The Tax Office has found this a difficult area in the past. With continuing intensive policy and community agendas, the tendency is to get one project almost finished when another comes rolling over the top. So we have been very intentional this time with a ‘formal benefits realisation measurement process’ built in, and an ongoing assessment of how we are going against the initial intent and outcomes.
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Supporting existing business operations. Implementation of major change causes a lot of transition issues, so the engagement with the other Tax Office divisions or sub-plans, particularly the compliance and the operations areas of the office, is very intense indeed, to help manage the impact of the changes.
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Growing emphasis on people and change management. Some people have said ‘you will need a culture change program to complement the other activities’. We thought about that pretty hard, and concluded people are not going to change their attitudes or approaches until there is something tangibly different in their work life. So we have tailored the approach to people and change management to be much more closely aligned to the period just before they are about to experience something that is significantly different. In a 4-5 year program this is not immediate.
However I mentioned that we directly impacted 3000 staff last year, and will impact 12,000 staff this year. So people and change management is about half of our focus and concentration at this time.
We have adopted a model to frame our approach. At one end of the spectrum there are some very hard or concrete process and systems elements – for example, of course you have to train people on the new systems and help them with ongoing performance support. There are organisational job design issues to be addressed. That’s all very concrete. At the other end there are many softer but equally critical elements such as sponsorship and communications, and behavioural change and expectations.
