Shannon Trueman

Obviously you have some re-branding in the back of your mind.

Absolutely, we have to.

Are you also thinking about succession issues as well?

Yes.

And how does that manifest itself? Is it developing key people from within or hiring from outside?

Well, I think it’s sort of a bit of both. If people within feel they have the skill to step up to it and they’ve outlined it in their performance reviews and stuff like that then certainly yes we’ll look at it. But if there isn’t, we need to get in people from outside. I mean there are advantages to both really. Having someone from within, they know your processes, they know the personality of the organisation and the team, that’s important. But then getting a fresh face in the door is good too because there are fresh ideas.

So that’s what you are sort of wrestling with at the moment I guess?

Yes probably. Yes we are.

Just on the area of change management, I think a lot of people have the view that it involves bringing in consultants to cut headcount. Is that a bit off the mark?

Well, change management for what we do is more around saying, look there’s a new process in place or there’s a new project coming in, how do we ensure the success of this initiative or this project? The only what that you can do that is by communicating the change to people and that has to be done upfront. And if you look at every project in every organisation or government department that’s failed, it is because they have not employed a change management and communications strategy. I mean, all of the IT projects that have been huge disasters, key implementations and SAP implementations, there was nothing around it. And it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars invested that goes down the gurgler because they didn’t communicate.

So say there’s a new IT system going in, what will you go in and do?

We look at what communication avenues there are available in the organisation and we’ll look at the impact to the business. So we’ll do an impact analysis and we’ll do a training needs analysis and say, well if this is where you are now and this is where you need to be, then what’s the gap and how do we help you get there? And then we do some measurements on how well we helped them to get them there.

Obviously for big companies there is a lot of money involved in the new project that’s essential, but is it something SMEs should think about too before they go in and start something big?

Absolutely, they should do that. I suppose we’re lucky in what we do in that we have exposure to the big end of town and that’s been invaluable in helping us build our business. There are lots of things that you can take into your business and say it’s scalable to small and medium enterprises.

And you can also dodge some of the things that they do wrong too, of course?

Well of course, but that’s a learning exercise, isn’t it? You can turn that into a positive.