Not kidding.  A client said this to me one time.

—–

Have you ever been on a project where you had budget, people, ample time and seemingly the will to kick some serious ass, but the client or sponsor was constantly saying… “not yet…”??

A number of years ago, I was doing work for a government client – I was the change management lead for a major system implementation.  I was brought in on the late side of early, which is to say we still had a couple years to go but the project was already a couple years old (maybe it was the early side of late).  Bottom line – there was still plenty of time to  get ready but the horse was already well out of the barn.

One of the first things I wanted to do was an organizational assessment – I wanted to get an understanding of both the culture that existed within the user community and the state of any communications-to-date (which were extremely limited) … had they had any impact (positive or negative).  Within a month, we were ready to rock and roll.  The Project Director, Executive Sponsor, Business Owner had all okayed it and we were about to get going.

Then the stall tactics came.

The only thing we were waiting for was for a senior-level bureaucrat to push out a communique to launch the assessment.  It was drafted and approved.  Literally waiting to hit “send.” And this was the process we had to follow to launch this program — as a consultant, I really couldn’t do it myself and neither the PM nor Project Director were willing to break protocol.

Not yet.

For those of you whom have worked in a government environment, you can appreciate how decisions are made and how slow the pace can be.  Did I mention an election was coming too.  From what I’ve seen, a pending election drives one of two main behaviours:

(1) everything stops until after the election

(2) everything is jammed in before the election

I was in scenario (1).  But no one was saying that.  Anything that required communication was basically put on the back-burner, unofficially of course.

Not yet.

A big part of managing change is communicating so obviously this was frustrating for me and my team.  For the next several months, we did a lot of planning but very little execution.  There was a lot of stalling and growing concern that we were not doing the things we needed to be successful in the long term.  And this was being brought to our steering committee’s attention on a regular basis.

Not yet.

One day, I pulled the Project Director aside and asked him what was going on.  His answer?

“We’d like to do Change Management in stealth mode.”

I was blown away.  “Stealth mode?” I asked.

“… just for a couple more months until the (new) Government’s first budget is passed,” he added.

Holy cow! (these weren’t my exact thoughts)

So what did I say?  I told him that change management is anything but stealth.  We need to talk about what’s happening and why.  We need to spend time asking people what they think and how they feel about the new direction.  We need to observe and listen… and answer questions.  We need to brag, we need to get people on board, we need to lead. He needs to lead.

When I finished my rant, I calmly reminded him that delays will pose great risk to the success of this project and that if he was willing to take that risk, it was his call.  But my advice was to not take that risk, for his sake or for the organization’s.

We had a major communication out the door within 2 weeks of that conversation… and the rest is history, fortunately.

Going into “stealth mode” is the enemy of change.  And that makes it the enemy of success.