It isn’t.. Trust me it isn’t . It isn’t enough to roll out change and then leave it to BAU to survive. This is equivalent of bringing a child in the world and leaving them on their own even before they can walk. Change has to be cared for, embedded and then at the right time made BAU. In my experience, organisations are always in a  hurry to make things BAU.  That is exactly where we undo most of the efforts to introduce change

Look at most of the project organisations set-ups for change projects, you will find Business Readiness as a stream but you will rarely find a stream around ‘ BAU assurance’ or ‘ Change Assurance’.  We put in lot of efforts to ensure that the business is ready to receive the change but we seem to put none to ensure that the change is supported on an ongoing basis. I am sure that the budget distribution on change projects reflect the same situation. Majority of budget is allocated to preparing for the change and introducing the change. By the time that happens, the ‘project’ has very little left for ongoing change assurance. If needed money has to be found from BAU and that is always flushed with cash, isn’t it 🙂

It is ironic that in most cases,  we expect change to be supported by the existing structures. We tend to retrofit the change to work with existing systems. It is almost a case of someone giving you a latest car but asking me to drive it on the same old narrow bumpy road. How will my experience be? frustrating to say the least. It is likely that I am not going to use that car much because it means more hassle for me and very little use. That is how internal customers feel most of the times. They feel that they are left alone to grapple with the change on their own and the support provided is not what they would expect.

Change is a journey and you can argue that well begun is half done. Are we really happy with half done? Should we be happy with half done? As per me, half done will cause more harm than good when it comes to change. I am sure all of us know this and most of us agree that we need better support to embed change on an ongoing basis. Change and transformation is too critical to be left to BAU. We need dedicated structures and processes to ensure that change is not just introduced but also embedded.

For all said and done, when it comes to change Half begun might be well done but it’s just not good enough !