Implementing Solutions

At some point the consideration of options begins to focus down on a very small set of choices. The confidence in appropriateness is high. And the willingness of the organization to proceed has been revisited. It becomes time to implement rather than debate.

If you prefer a less conceptual approach, there is a dramatic script that exemplifies how this phase of problem solving might look in a business setting.

At this point the work if very much like project planning. Task definition. Work assignments. Resource commitment. Schedule estimation. All the disciplines of project management for planning and monitoring the work apply.

At some planning has to stop, and "doing" has to start. The point may seem trivial, but there is a certain courage to pulling the trigger, and that moment deserves to be acknowledged.

Many organizations stumble at exactly this point. A task force has been commissioned to "make recommendations" and after their presentation to the senior team, they are honored, thanked...but ultimately dismissed. The senior team retires to consider the solution out of context, or at least in some new context. And the project either dies or is modified to such an extent that even the authors cannot recognize their work.

And the next time they are asked to "develop recommendations" they know it was will be an exercise in futility.

One of the benefits under this model is that the criteria for success are surfaced early, back in the Framing stage. The task force is empowered to make the changes (with due respect to the risks of organizational change). The presentation to the senior team is on lessons learned in implementation and successes achieved. The proposal presented is to roll out a proven product that has met the criteria set out for the team to meet and demonstrated its value in pilots, pretests, or trial runs.

Things seldom (never?) come out as we planned. Variance from plan is considered "noise" or "error" in traditional project management. But in implementing solutions, the experience of driving change often reveals new dimensions of the problem. For this reason, monitoring is not just checking process against plan, it is a strategy for extending the earlier phase of exploring the problem. Insights may be so strong that what we thought was implementation turns out to be "experimentation" leading to a new definition of the problem.

Or perhaps the implementation has surfaced an entirely new problem. So the end of one cycle may be the start of another.

This generativity in implementation is problematic for some. For a sizable portion of the population, the strong expectation is for closure, not for revisiting the whole process from the start. This simply means that change is sometimes political as well as practical.

As I have suggested, this phase may turn back on some of the earlier phases. But even when it comes to a graceful close, there are still decisions to consider. Did the process of changing the organization provide new insights into new elements of the situation? Are we confident this solution will survive? Do we have another problem to consider (hopefully more complex and more central)? So the next step may be the first step.