HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

My two mentors at BCG, Harold L. Sirkin and Perry Keenan, are very active in the field of change management. In October 2005, they, together with Alan Jackson, another vice president at BCG, published in Harvard. Business Review a new framework, known as DICE, that delineates the four critical elements of a successful change project.¹ This framework was tested on more than 1,000 change projects and has been found to be very effective. The tool is quite consistent with my experience in change projects. I find it a useful way to try to assess whether a change project is set up for success or failure.

According to DICE, these are the four critical elements to drive a successful change project:

D: Short duration between reviews of the project. Reviews are generated when project teams report concrete progress toward the goal of the project. The authors suggest that complex projects should be reviewed every two weeks. More familiar projects should be reviewed every six to eight weeks, but not longer than eight weeks because “the probability that change initiatives will run into trouble rises exponentially when the time between reviews exceeds eight weeks.”

I: Integrity of the team. This means that the project team is selected so they can be relied on for the project. The team has among its members all the necessary skills, knowledge, viewpoints, and informal power to complete the work necessary in the project. The work usually includes information collection, analysis to solve problems, project management, presentations, communications, and many other steps. The team members should also be motivated and energetic since change projects can be high pressure.

C: Commitment of the most powerful executives (counting both formal and informal power) as well as the key staff affected by the changes. The commitment must also be consistently communicated loud and clear to the organization: “A rule of thumb: when you (top level executives) feel that you are talking up a change initiative at least three times more than you need to, your managers will feel that you are backing the transformation.”

E: Limited additional effort required of employees to make the change. A change project has higher likelihood of success if the effort needed for those affected to change over to the new process is limited: “Ideally, no one's workload should increase more than 10 percent. Go beyond that, and the initiative will probably run into trouble.'' This means that the implementation of and changeover to the new process must be carefully planned, including steps such as scheduling the change to happen during low season, hiring temporary staff, and so on, so that employees are not overworked.

1. Harold J. Sirkin, Perry Keenan, and Alan Jackson, “The Hard Side of Change Management,” Harvard Business Review (October 2005): 109–118. Quoted passages are from pp. 2, 4, and 6 of the reprint.