Andy Verone:

So today, we’re going to talk about change and making missions impossible possible, navigating change in megaprojects. And I’m joined today by my colleague, Ryan Craaybeek. And today, Ryan is actually going to be in character and be Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible movie. So Ryan, thank you for joining. And hopefully, everybody can see the screen and hear us.

Okay, just a quick introduction. My name is Andy Verone, and I look after strategy for Contruent. This is my 40th year working in engineering construction technology. Super excited to be part of this team. And I’ll get into a little bit of detail as we go through the first few slides. But Ryan, over to you, go ahead and give a quick intro.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Andy, excited to be here today. So for everyone who’s joined us today, thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Ryan Craaybeek. And I’m a Solutions Consultant with Contruent. I come to you with over 15 years of experience in the project controls technology space. I’ve worked with organizations around the globe in different roles, working with owners, EPCs, self-performing contractors, etc. And I look forward to bringing my experiences and knowledge to today’s presentation. So I look forward to it. Thanks, Andy, back to you.

Andy Verone:

Thank you. Let’s get to the next slide. Then folks, like I said, I’ll just spend a couple of minutes talking about Contruent and who we are. And what we’re up to. Our mission is clear. I love being part of an organization that has such a clear mission. It’s really empowering you, decision-makers, to build our world’s infrastructure with precision and speed. And we’ll get into this, some of that as we go through the presentation today. 

And then what’s in the name Contruent? You know, we can look a little way we break that name down, but for me, it’s performing, promoting, or causing a specific action. And that’s what we do every day. We try to add value to our customers and the projects that they’re working on. Really, really precise in what we do. And for those of you who know, the PRISM technology has been around for over 25 years. We have an unbelievable customer base. We have years of best practices built into the solution. And this is just one of those areas that we’re going to share with you today around change.

So Ryan, to the next one. So, just to be real brief on what we do. It really is delivering capital project management software that’s faster to deliver. And we really, really focus on that. I’ve been part of large tech organizations where you buy the software, even if it’s software as a service, and you might be a year out before you’re actually receiving value for that investment. You know, we really like to look at our implementations as a fixed price as a fixed bid. And for those of you in construction, you know that a fixed bid requires alignment on the requirements. What is it we’re going to build? And in this case, we’ve really, really taken the time to understand the market and our implementation. So configure the software to quickly bring the reporting that you need, so you can manage your megaproject and your programs.

Ryan, please advance to the next slide. And then this slide speaks for itself. We are blessed with having so many customers and projects literally across the globe. This slide to me, when I was joining the company about two and a half months ago, really was the moment that I said, “Look, look at the reach that this small software company has and the tremendous projects under management and the value of those projects literally in the trillions of dollars.”

Ryan, next, please. And then some of the customers that we serve, if you think about when Ryan and I engage with our customer base, it might be someone that’s building a high-speed train, might be an engineering and construction company that’s trying to do a different delivery method. Maybe they’re embarking on their first design-build. Or maybe it’s an EPC or EPCM, oil and gas, utilities, mining, surprisingly, one of our biggest industries we have. I think we have nine of the top 10 mines in the world that use Contruent Enterprise to help manage their projects. And if you’ve ever been around a mining project, those are some massive, massive projects with very, very large logistical plans. So again, serving these customers in these industries is what we do every day.

Ryan, hit the next one. So we want to get to know you a little bit, and probably three or four times throughout today’s webinar, we’ll ask a couple of polling questions. So for the first one out of the gate, we just like to know who we have with us. If you can quickly answer the poll: where do you fit in here? Are you a cost engineer? Are you an executive, project controls manager, change manager, or another person if we haven’t listed you here? For everybody, please just take a second. And give us a quick response. That would be helpful. It’s always good to know the audience that you’re presenting to. And give that just a second to complete.

Alright, we will continue to keep the poll open for another couple of seconds. And let’s get into the presentation. I think Ryan and I both had our design criteria for this was really, let’s keep it short. In today’s busy world, an hour of content is a lot of content. So we’re going to try to go through this at a good pace. But at the same time, we want to leave some time for questions and answers. We know you all need to get back to your day job and back to your project. So, Ryan, with that, let’s jump in. And folks, all I’ll add context as needed throughout the presentation.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Yeah, great. Thanks, Andy. And thanks to all who joined us today. It looks like there’s a good number of you out there. So once again, appreciate your time and your attention today.

Alright, so let’s dig in. Today’s topic is about how to get business value out of change management in your construction project management. So to set the stage for change, I wanted to start off by reviewing some statistics.

And specifically, statistics around projects. So, in this case here, we’ve got a few different statistics that come from a number of different sources. And something’s telling me, based on the audience out there today, all being experts and professionals in the space, you’ve probably seen statistics like this before. So projects aren’t delivered on time and on budget, and the average cost overrun is X percent. So again, these are statistics that we’ve likely all seen before. And, I think that we could all agree that there are a number of factors or reasons. Why are these numbers the way they are? And what contributes to those numbers.

And one of those contributors happens to be change. And actually, change is a major contributor to those project statistics. It turns out that change orders and contract modifications increase contract value by, on average, 5 to 10%. So 5 to 10% maybe doesn’t sound like a big number. But then when you dig in, and you realize that the global construction contract value was over $10 trillion in 2020, that number starts getting a little bit bigger, right anywhere from 500 plus billion to 1 trillion in the cost of changes.

So, what causes change? Well, one, that’s a loaded question. And there isn’t a single answer. Once again, all of the folks online here today, you’re experts in space. And I’m sure we could all agree that there’s a lot that goes on in a mega-project. You have the different phases and stages, the project lifecycle, the different functions that take place, you have stakeholders and supply chain participants, etc., etc. There’s a lot that goes on. So there’s a lot of risk for change, whether it’s natural causes such as weather or legal issues, design errors, or breakdown in communication. There’s no shortage of reasons that cause change. And change can come in different forms.

For example, new scope or rework. And change isn’t isolated. The effects of change are not isolated. All of the stakeholders across the project landscape are going to be affected.

So, in other words, let’s go ahead and talk about our mission. So we understand that change is impactful, and there are a lot of causes for change. And again, our mission today is how to get business value from gaining better control over change in your construction project management. In my opinion, the mission is twofold. Gain better control over change, but also get business value from it. 

So, how do we get better business value from it? Well, first, an organization must identify what constitutes business value to the organization. Now, that may vary depending on the role of the organization. Whether you’re an owner, a construction manager, or a self-performed contractor, business value can be defined differently. And identifying that value is the first step. Is it revenue? Is it lowering the cost? Is it public perception? 

Second, you need to align the business value to the practical application of tools and processes. Also, learn more about your organization’s change management current state. And what I mean by that is how are you managing change today? People, process, tools. What causes change in your projects? And what is the impact from a cost perspective? So knowing this will assist in identifying the building block to establishing the right infrastructure to manage change and drive standardization and efficiency.

Right, so to build and establish the right infrastructure to gain better control over change, one must tie the build of that infrastructure to executive business drivers. Really, it’s what do executives care about? What’s important to them? What drives them? Is that reducing costs, growing revenue, etc.? 

So, engaging executives is key. Executive support will provide the sponsorship needed to establish change management as a core function across all levels and phases of a project and become more proactive versus reactive. Bottom line is when executives care, people listen. 

So, Andy, based on your experience, what are your thoughts about the importance of executive engagement?

Andy Verone:

Yeah, Ryan, great setup. And we should have asked the 43 participants if they were willing to accept the mission. So this surely is a mission. But I think about the one thing that really struck me on your previous slide was the public perception. And how important that is for both the owners and the delivery teams. I spent 25 years in construction and engineering. And I had the opportunity to work on some big projects that had big public interactions, one of those being the Alaska pipeline. If I think back to the importance of public perception around the project’s success, right on time, on budget, and delivering the value that it was set out to be, there was no bigger stake. You had to do that. It was a high-profile project. And I’m sure some of our participants today are working on high-impact projects. 

The other thing I think is key is change truly drives profitability and predictability. So at the end of the day, what makes a successful project in this industry? It’s managing change, understanding the roles and responsibilities, who owns the change, did you budget for the change. Those are all critical things. And at the end of the day, if you’re sitting with your CEO, or your COO, or president of business operations, these things should not. I always like to try to involve the executives, not only in the outcome of change but how the change process is built and really every step of the way. So again, getting that executive involvement will help drive success. I think it’s great.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Great, thanks. Thanks, Andy. So, in summary, and before we move on, in order to get value from gaining better control over change, an organization must understand what constitutes the business value to the organization. They must understand their current state as it relates to their change management process, the tools and processes, people, etc. Understanding what those causes of change are in your projects? What are the impacts? Where are the areas for improvement as it relates to your change management process? Then, build and establish an infrastructure that is tied to executive drivers to support better control over change. Alright.

So, before we move on to the next topic, where we’ll drive into some customer best practices, let’s go ahead and turn it back over to the audience and do another audience poll. So, in this case, we would like to hear from the audience about what you feel or think is the most difficult part of change.

Andy Verone:

Yeah, Ryan. These are all great. It’s almost like it should have been one all the above. So, for any project and gotta plan for it, you got to stamp it, need to measure it, budget for it, and get stakeholder buy it? I mean, those are all really critical as the audience here votes on the results.

Ryan Craaybeek:

We’ve got some results coming in.

Andy Verone:

Yeah, it’s good to see the results. Very good. Why don’t you run through those real quick?

Interesting, it is interesting the staffing may not be an issue. They may feel like they’re appropriately staffed. So great results. Stakeholders buy in obviously big, big differentiators. And that’s good stuff. That’s great feedback, guys. Thank you.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Yeah, that aligns with what we just got done discussing around that executive and engagement, and tying the initiative to what matters at the executive level, and to the company as a whole. So good stuff. Alright. Well, that’s a great segue into the next portion of the presentation, which is going to be about breaking down the Mission Impossible.

Or, planning for your mission. Which, and pardon me, I’m sorry, the six steps of the Mission Impossible. So really, this breaks down as recommendations, six recommendations that are based on customer best practices, all for the purpose of gaining better control over change. And we’ll go through each one of these, starting with planning for change.

So plan for change. Bottom line is, change is going to happen. So we’re not here to say that we’re going to help you avoid or eliminate change, but it’s about gaining better control over change. And it starts with planning for change?

So, the planning must be for every stage of the project lifecycle. And your plan must be realistic. So again, that’s realistic from the perspective that, hey, change is gonna happen. We should all agree. And avoid biases or over-optimism. There are going to be knowns, and there are going to be unknowns, plan for them. 

So, some recommendations based on the best practice, right from a planning perspective, is set your baseline scope early, establish a contracting strategy that allows for change, and clearly establish project cost, scope, and schedule. Then, make sure that people are aware and educated on the change order policy, and empower them to recognize the need for change. In addition, plan for the unknowns, right? Known as planned contingency. Because there are going to be those unknowns. And we’ll dig into that in more detail here in a little bit. But again, change is going to happen. Plan for it.

In addition to planning for change, an organization should identify and create a common integration point where all of the different data structures come together to establish, let’s call it a golden thread, allowing change to ripple through the various disciplines, all for the purpose of providing transparency across the team. So, in other words, make sure the team is informed and aware of changes in other areas. So your teammates can evaluate the potential impact on their discipline and make the updates.

So, for example, maybe there’s a contract change. And there may be a schedule or a cost impact. With the common integration point, a scheduler and or a cost engineer will be aware of a potential change being managed by the contract administrator. So, in addition to having that common integration point and having that structure, systematize the structure and the content integration point, get it into a system. So that ripple effect is automated and notifies the correct team members, so they’re aware and in the know. And we’ll talk about systemizing the process here in a little bit more detail in a little bit.

So, in addition to planning, organizations need to budget for change. As mentioned before, change is going to happen. There are many reasons for change. Budget for it. A structure that we’ve seen with customer best practices, give your teams a budget that they can manage based on their role. So, a financial budget for the accounting and finance team, right in a control budget for the contractors’ team that is dealing with the supply chain. Set up a budget for your risk team to own and own some contingency as well.

In addition to empowering teams with budgets, when setting the budget, be realistic, right and know things are going to happen. So give a little room, or in other words, plan contingency. This approach will ensure you have the money available when change happens, which will speed up how the process changes or how you process changes. So, Andy, I feel like this is another area where some of your insights and thoughts could be beneficial. Any thoughts to share from a change?

Andy Verone:

Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you. So I think you really did a great job covering the slide. I think, for me, having that governance in place early on is important. And sometimes we don’t have to have it at the corporate level. If you’re running a big enough program, big enough project, have that governance in place early. And I think I’ll just reiterate what you said, I mean, having clear roles and responsibilities around change, who owns the change? 

By the way, not only ownership of the change but responsibility for communicating change is really critical. And it just can’t stress enough. I think if we ever want to learn from the impacts of change, we’ve got to get it into a system. We’ve got to be able to report on these because you got to be able to look at the variances, what was the impact of the change. And can I learn from that? From project to project to project, every project is different. We know that, right? But, there are similarities, and especially in some of our customers, who do a type of building and constructing or design. So how do they then learn from previous changes, and that could actually have a material impact on the company’s bottom line over time? So, good job on their budget for change. Very important topic.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Excellent, thanks, Andy. So how to structure for change?

Okay, there are a number of factors that drive change structure. And it starts with defining your change policy. How are you going to deal with change? That policy can then be tied to other factors such as people, process, etcetera. And we’ll go through each one of these in a little bit more detail.

Let’s talk about change types. You have change orders, but what about trends or potential changes? Are you tracking that? Best practice suggests that managing and tracking trends is beneficial, and you should be forecasting against those and evaluating the potential impact the potential impact. So, in other words, being proactive, right by not only identifying but then managing and tracking those trends, not just the changes. And Andy, I know that this is an area that you have a lot of thoughts and comments around the value of being proactive and managing trends as well as changes.

Andy Verone:

Ryan, I think. For me, probably a day doesn’t go by where I get asked a question like, where do machine learning and artificial intelligence play a role in engineering and construction. And, again, you get the governance in place, you systematize the process, and then we can go even one step further than being proactive. We can actually have predictions. So this is one area that I’ve spent probably the last four or five years looking at the types of change, the impacts of change, the uncertainty of change because there are things impacted that are out of our control.

You mentioned whether there are other things. We have a customer who just experienced an earthquake in South America. No one knew that was coming. It impacted projects. But how do you capture this in a proactive way that you can learn from, and machine learning, loading up the system, getting those patterns right, training the models so that they can help organizations better understand the impact of change? And that’s where the future is.

I mean, we see that being done on schedules today. There are a lot of point solutions out there that can ingest schedules from all sorts of projects all over the world and actually doing predictive scheduling now. So doing a prediction on the type, size, and location of, let’s just say, a structure, a bridge. There’s predictive analytics that allow that to happen. I think the same can be said with change management. If you get proactive now, get the governance in place, you articulate the value of change, then the opportunity for MI to come in and learn the value of change and what’s happening. I mean, I think it’s an endless possibility for our customer base.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Yeah, great. Great points, Andy. Thank you for that. Okay, so let’s go ahead and move on to the next. And so, in this case, here, we’re starting to talk about process and having a change review process. And, the people that support the process. So every change that comes in, the change is going to go through a standardized process that maybe evaluates the cost, the schedule impacts, and the review process, right makes it collaborative. And so, the right people are involved, and there are collective or collaborative decisions being made. The change itself is being communicated early on from a trend or potential change perspective, providing visibility across the entire team that there could potentially be a change coming and be prepared. As well as when preparing for when that change actually hits.

So again, the communication. So having a review process, a standardized review process that will include and incorporate the different stages or phases of that change lifecycle from when the event occurs all the way through making that decision, communicating, and implementing. So this will enable integrity right through the standardization of a review process.

Having an approval process with escalation thresholds. So what I mean by that is for example, maybe there’s a low-value change that’s going through the process. Well, maybe that only requires senior management approval versus maybe sending every single change up to the higher levels of the organization for approval. So this is something that should be mapped out. Identify the different types of changes, the threshold that is tied to those changes, whether again, it’s dollar value or other factors, and then identify and map out the authority and level of authority for approval. And again, this can help with driving an efficient Change Approval Process, where, again, certain approvals or certain changes may not require level three approvals.

In addition to that, providing visibility into a trend or a change, as I mentioned earlier, around the review process. One of the review process components should be communicating and providing that visibility across the entire team, especially those that may be affected by the change. So if we incorporate change status within the overall process, the visibility is going to be more defined, and people will better understand the potential, not only the potential impact but the timing, the severity, etc. So, again, having statuses on those trends and changes as they go through the lifecycle, just add that additional characteristic or metadata that can be meaningful as you communicate out to the greater team.

In addition to that, we mentioned earlier around budgeting for change, and part of that is budgeting for contingency and having a contingency plan. A plan that delegates authority to manage contingency at different levels. And make sure those people know who owns and can release the contingency. And so we’ve mentioned earlier about having budgets and budgeting for change. In this case, part of that budget is having that contingency and having the opportunity to own that contingency and approve contingency drawdown.

And there’s the value behind that. By having a contingency plan that includes those various levels of authority, going back to our teams owning their budget and contingency, you need fewer approvals. And so you don’t have to take everything back to the highest level of the approval chain. So, this goes back to that approval process. And then, ultimately, speeding up the process, minimizing the burden of administrative teams.

The bottom line is that it takes less time and less money not only to manage the change but also to draw down from contingency in order to update budgets, etc. All right, and another one is around public perception. So again, because we went ahead, and we budgeted and planned in contingency, we’re not having to go back and ask for more money. Contingency is there for us to just draw down from because the budget and the money have already been approved. And so again, having a contingency strategy, a contingency plan, has a number of different benefits, especially when it’s part of the overall process. And the people and teams have been empowered to manage those budgets and contingency.

As we mentioned earlier around systematizing. So what we’ve talked about here around structuring for change, ultimately, we’ve talked about, well, what’s our policy? What’s the process as it relates to the review of changes, what types of changes, and who can approve? All of that is a process that includes people and now being able to systematize it. That can help, implement and govern the policy, make it a standard, and automate a lot of what we discussed from a review and approval process. All of the while providing those insights and communicating them by providing visibility to the team. Right on the changes status, the potential impacts, the opportunity to evaluate and forecast. A system that supports the golden thread or ripple effect that I mentioned earlier.

Okay, so let’s move on to recommendation number three, which is staff for change. And, I love that we did that poll earlier. Because one of the areas where it seemed there was least concern was around resources and really staffing for change. So it seems that maybe the members out there, the audience members, understand the value of having a team that includes responsibility for owning that change management process.

And that’s what this slide really is about, and this specific recommendation and best practice, it’s about the people, a change policy and a standardized process needs to be supported by people. So who’s responsible for the change control on your projects? Is the policy and process being communicated to the teams? Do they know what it is? Do they know their role in the process? By having a team that owns the change management process, there’s accountability, there’s resources to ensure that the change process is communicated and followed. So, process and people equal effective change control? And it seems that, again, from the poll earlier, many on the call today would agree.

So speaking of the audience poll, it’s that time again. So we’ll ask the audience to go ahead and answer another question for us. So does your organization have a formalized change management role for project teams? Not sure. We’re going to be surprised by what we get back here. But a question for the audience nonetheless.

Andy Verone:

Yeah, Ryan, I think it might be surprising as well. Maybe the other question, it was more of a priority based where they think the biggest impact for change, and maybe we’ll be surprised that I know, the last time I did this, the response was about that. It’s, it’s actually great. We got about 47 48 people on the call. And it’s great to see that we’ve got 68% of the folks on the call to have an official change manager role on the project team. We did this in DC a few weeks ago at the project control expos. And it was very surprising how few organizations actually had that role. So this is great Intel for us, folks. And thanks again for your participation really good.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Yeah, excellent. Excellent. Okay, so let’s move on to recommendation number four, measure change. You have to measure change. And when we say measure change, we’re not talking about measuring the project change. Of course, you need to measure change, that’s change management, leverage forecasting, etc. But what we’re talking about here specifically is managing your or I’m sorry, measuring your change management process. So the process you have today, is it working? Is it effective and efficient? Are there areas for improvement? How do you go about measuring your process?

And so, again, some of the things that we’ve seen from our customers really come down to identifying, well, what are those metrics? Is there an opportunity to reduce time, maybe avoid delays, become more effective? So, as we see in the first column around performance metrics, there are a few there. There are recommendations on how to measure those metrics. And then, on the far right column, with your ROI.

This really is a slide and a practice, or a recommendation, that can really start to produce the value that you’re trying to get out of having better control over change. So if you’re able to reduce time spent on contract admin changes or reduce the number of missed delayed payments, etc., all of that can equate to lowering costs or your ROI. And again, remember, this is getting value out of better control over change.

So some things to think about there. And, of course, it’s all about continuous improvement, not settling for the status quo. Put something in place, measure it, learn from it, make it better.

So forecasting your mission. Forecast when changes may be coming. We mentioned earlier to track trends and forecast them to gain earlier identification. And the opportunity to avoid or minimize the impact of that change by potentially performing what-if analysis against that impact. But at the end of the day, when you’re forecasting change and communicating, providing that visibility across the team, the team is aware, and each team member now has the opportunity to plan for that change. Also, as mentioned earlier, how can we go ahead and avoid or minimize the impact? So forecast changed.

And then, the sixth recommendation is to learn from your mission or learn from change. And so, coming down to lessons learned. Andy, I know that this is an area for you that you have a lot of great insight and thoughts around lessons learned. And so, I’ll turn it over to you for some of your commentary.

Andy Verone: Ryan, thanks. I think, as we kind of wrap up here, and we want to definitely leave some room for Q&A. But I think what it boils down to is what I said at the top. This isn’t the world according to Andy and Ryan. This is 25 years of working with customers from all over the globe and listening and learning. I mean, that’s how we built Contruent Enterprise. We listened to our customers. We serviced our customers. And what you saw here today is just one piece of those learnings and how important it is that we take those learnings and put them into a system.

Again, the value of having it in the system is you can measure it, you can benchmark it, you can store the learnings. You can rate the suppliers, rate your customers. Sometimes that’s the hardest thing for an engineering and construction company to do, a builder to do, is rate their customers. Not all customers are created equal. And on the other side, vice versa, not all contractors are created equal. So having this visibility at your fingertips and to be able to learn from it. It’s where the industry is going. I mean, it’s where I’ve spent a majority of the tech side of my career, trying to build those learnings, and Contruent Enterprises is that system that we pride ourselves on building that intellectual property and those learnings back into the software. So great job, Ryan. Good stuff.

Ryan Craaybeek:

Excellent. Okay, so let’s go ahead and definitely leave room for questions. So let’s wrap up here and summarize. So our mission today was to identify how to get value out of gaining better control over change in your projects. And we started off by talking about how to get value starting with what business value means in your organization. How does it tie to the executive business drivers and leverage that as sponsorship and support to build out and implement an infrastructure that is going to drive better control over change?

So that infrastructure is tied to the six best practice recommendations that we covered. So, identifying that infrastructure, but that includes planning for it, and structuring for it. Remember, the process as a whole, the review of the approval thresholds, budgeting for it, including contingency, the importance of systematizing the process to help automate and drive efficiency and, standardization, and consistency as you take on change. We talked about staffing for it and the importance of people. Measuring for forecasting and learning from it.

So that concludes the material that we had ready, prepared for today. So why don’t we go ahead, and I’ll turn it over to Sophia? I believe you have the capabilities to take on questions.

Moderator:

Yeah, folks have questions. We have time for a few. So feel free to write them in the chat. And I’ll queue them up for Andy and Ryan. So I’ll give folks a couple of seconds to do that.

Andy Verone:

Yeah, my apologies, folks. We should have put that at the top of the webinar; we had the Q&A capability. You guys could have been putting questions in there. All throughout. But if you have a question, it’d be great if you throw it into the Q&A section, and if not, listen. Ryan and I will be happy to answer future questions that you have. Or if there’s any of this, from a best practice perspective, that you’d like to go a little deeper on, obviously, we’d be happy to take you in and show you the capabilities we have, which is super exciting. And we’ll see. We’ll see where that leaves us.

Moderator:

Hey, Andy, I have one question for you. Companies often manage change in a state of reactiveness. What advice do you have for companies to get ahead of change and manage change more proactively?

Andy Verone:

It really goes back to the six steps that we just covered. I mean, to me, if I was back in the big infrastructure project world, those six steps for change that Ryan went through. That’s how you do it. You’ve got to be able to manage it, measure it, be proactive. The six steps are just so critical for us. I think that to me if you look at the best practices, you’ve got a fighting chance to manage change. You can actually succeed in the mission if you follow the six best practices. It’s a good question, Sophia. Thanks. Anything else? For any Q&A? We truly do have. One more? Can we make the slides available? That was one question we’ve got out there.

Moderator:

Yeah, this presentation will be available after the webinar. And so this will be sent to folks who are here today and folks who are registered. Okay, we have one more question, how do we best integrate risk management and the process for change management?

Andy Verone:

Yeah, great. Great question. Ryan, do you want to take a crack at that one?

Ryan Craaybeek:

Yeah, I mean, sure. I’ll take a crack at it. And please step in if you’d like, Andy. So how do we best integrate risk management and the process of change management? In my experience working with organizations, specifically on the topic of change, I feel that risk is a big component of change management. So identifying those risk items or issues, recording them, and then tying them directly to a trend or a potential change, as well as the change itself. And being aware of the tie between the risk and the trend or change. So it’s a great question. I find that it’s a best practice to tie the two together for a number of reasons as it relates to visibility, forecasting, and identifying impacts and mitigating, etcetera. So from a best practice perspective, it involves risk as a function and part of the overall change management process. Being able to identify, record, and tie risks to those potential changes or trends as well as changes themselves. Yeah, any comments on that, Andy?

Andy Verone:

I can spend some time on this. To me, I would love to see your risk register. How many risks actually converted to change? To me, if you’re in the predictive world and you’re trying to see what risk on the risk registry actually ties to a change. To me, having the two tied as key and systematically having them linked is important. But more importantly, having that back to the stakeholders, having all the stakeholders in the organization understand the risks that are on the project and the impact of change they can have, whether in or out of a system. I mean, there are plenty of great risk management tools out there. But sometimes, those risk management tools are standalone. But just having them tied back to the governance, having that visibility of how many of those risks on that certain type of project actually drove a change. Well, that is what gets me excited. I think you would find if you’re a builder, contractor, you would see those risks driving similar changes throughout many of your projects. I think it’s a great question.

Moderator:

I think we have one more minute, and we have one last question. So, how do you influence senior management to accept or approve change and have them socialize the trending cost and schedule change with the executive team?

Andy Verone:

Yeah, for me, it really comes down to using the right language. So, we touched on it briefly today. When you go into the executive’s office, maybe it’s a project executive managing a portfolio of projects, and you can articulate project profitability, the risk of project profitability, or the advantage of project profitability. Go into those meetings speaking in terms of project profitability instead of just detailing that a change is going to happen. 

Whether it’s a supply issue, a defect, or a design problem, elevate the conversation to something that really resonates with them. And maybe it’s project profitability. Project profitability can be determined plus or minus. If we don’t manage these changes, I think it’d be to go and really talk to them at their level of what their drivers are, and everyone’s different. Public perception, if it’s a big public infrastructure project, project profitability, project bonus, listen, hey, let’s be realistic about what drives some of the big project folks, is the potential for project bonus that’s right for them and the team. So go in talking their language, let them know the impacts of the change, and be on their terms, and that helps with adoption. 

More to come, folks. We plan on doing a series of these throughout the year, and we hope everyone has a great holiday season. We’ll see you soon.