Business Change Diamond

This tool was used extensively during my days at Diageo which was expanding rapidly through acquisition.  This clearly involved critical integration of acquired businesses structures, systems, technologies, workforces etc.. with the added challenges of managing potentially opposing cultures.  This was originally a Guinness model which facilitated these integrations’ successes by using the key rule that if any of the above 5 areas are changed, 1. Process, 2. Technology, 3. Systems, 4. Organisation & Skills, 5, Culture then ALL other 4 areas need to be reviewed as change could impact these as a consequence. 

An example might be that an old legacy system needed to be replaced with clear mapping of data to the new global system.  This could have consequences on existing business  processes other integrated systems needing new technologies or infrastructure, re-organising support structures and services, recruiting and training staff on the new systems while managing cultural clashes.
 

Although the above could have been seen as a real risk to the business, these were seen as a great opportunity to decommission old legacy systems and migrate the new business onto common global systems, reducing cost and complexity while implementing best practice.  Best practice was based on re-engineering the common global business processes to be customer-centric at all times, reducing duplication of data, silos of information and cost.

However, the cultural aspect is key for change and needs to be managed carefully.  In most cases the so called critical legacy systems where “we’ve always done things this way” can be challenged when  moving to the global common system.  The system differences, are often based on local bad practices and represent 5-10% of the overall process.  The easiest and cheapest solution is to migrate to what is the common global “best practice” process and adopt the new way of doing things.