Across four seasons of Made to Grow, one theme has come back again and again regardless of who Rich Dale is talking to: change management. Whether the change is a new MRP system, a new process, a piece of automation or just a business growing faster than its structure can carry, the technology is almost never the reason a change project fails. It’s the people side that decides it.
In this compilation episode, we’ve pulled together a selection of thinking from five past guests on exactly that, covering how to prepare your team before you touch anything new, how to roll change out without losing people halfway through, and how to hold your culture and processes together while the business grows around you.
Watch this episode now:
Angela Fumpson is the founder of White Tiger, a specialist consultancy in quality management, leadership and business transformation. With a background in mechanical engineering and more than 25 years in manufacturing and engineering, Angela mentors leaders and teams through change projects and is the author of Business Journey for Tigers.
Mark Wood is Managing Director of Alliance Procurement Solutions, a consultancy working with manufacturing SMEs on supply chain, procurement, business intelligence and data analytics. Mark spent 20 years at Rolls-Royce before setting up APS, and his focus is on giving businesses better clarity in their data so they can make better decisions.
Oliver Caunt is Managing Director of JCS Nuclear Solutions, a family business based in Bury providing nuclear radiation detection, sensing and shielding solutions. Oliver led the business through a full migration from spreadsheets to Xero and Flowlens, with records dating back to the mid-1980s to contend with.
Rob White is Director of Excellence at Teledyne DD-Scientific, a Fareham-based manufacturer of electrochemical gas sensors for industrial safety, healthcare and environmental monitoring. Rob has led the business through years of iterative automation work, and moved from a sales background into a role focused entirely on quality, efficiency and continuous improvement.
Stephen Ottaway is Managing Director of Korvus Technology a UK manufacturer of physical vapour deposition tools for research and development across academia, semiconductor research, medical devices and green energy. Stephen has taken Korvus from a team of four to a team of eighteen in a couple of years.
Key Topics in This Episode
- Why you need to know whether your culture is ready for change before you go anywhere near software, and what a history of failed projects does to your odds
- Fear as the real source of resistance, including fear of role replacement, and why listening to individuals has to come before any rollout plan
- Why support at the start is not enough, and what Angela’s writing exercise reveals about the point where people slow down and start questioning whether the change is worth it
- Appetite for change as the door opener, and why leadership sponsorship makes or breaks an improvement programme in procurement just as much as in software
- Choosing the right champion, and why a direct line manager may not be the person your team is honest with
- Running parallel systems to build confidence in the figures, and how long you can reasonably ask people to input twice
- Making a pilot company-wide so that departments outside the project understand the demands being placed on the ones inside it
- Data cleansing as the single biggest chunk of a migration, and deciding how much history actually needs to come across
- Starting small with automation, and the three reasons worth automating for: safety, quality and productivity
- Leaning on external partners early and bringing capability in-house as you grow
- What scaling exposes in a business that used to run on instinctive trust, and why SOPs and documentation stop being optional
- Why showing people the reason a process matters works better than enforcing it
What’s Next?
If you’re in the middle of a change project, or about to start one, the throughline across all five conversations is that the groundwork is the work. Listen to your team before you choose anything, keep supporting them well past go-live, and tell the whole business what’s happening rather than running it behind closed doors.
The full episodes with each guest are in the back catalogue and linked below. If you want to talk your own project through, you can get in touch with us at flowlens.com.
Further Reading & Resources
- Download your free copy of the Fearless Digital Transformation book
- Made To Grow S03 E02: Foundations for Effective Change Management with Angela Fumpson
- Made To Grow S03 E03: Fearlessly Executing Your Change Management Plan with Angela Fumpson
- Made To Grow S03 E06: From Pain to Profit, How Data Transforms Manufacturers with Mark Wood
- Made To Grow S02 E06: Unlocking Growth with Digital Tools for Manufacturers
- Made To Grow S02 E10: Embedding a Culture of Excellence with Rob White
- Made To Grow S04 E04: From Startup to Scaleup with Stephen Ottaway
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