Testing Business Change - Five Steps to Improve the Practical Impact of Your Change Implementation

The biggest food retailer in Britain operates a small store near my house where they have supplemented normal checkouts with a couple of 'self-checkout' stands for shoppers to scan and pay for their goods without a cashier.

That's the theory. In practice (as I found last week) one stand was out of order while the other reported an error if I didn't put items into the shopping bag just-so, demanded cashier approval to buy vanilla essence (as it has alcohol in it) and swallowed my money without recognizing or refunding it. I and several other customers got so frustrated with the system that cashiers had to leave their tills to salvage the self-service experience.

This company is recognized as one the best businesses in Britain. So what on earth led them to foist such a poor experience on their customers? The answer, I surmise, must be a failure of thinking -- in particular, thinking about testing. Patently, the operation of these new stands has not been tested with real customers using real staff doing real transactions -- or if they have, the lessons have not been learned.

They are not alone. Many companies are equally guilty. While they test new technology thoroughly, they don't test new business operations nearly so well. The result is that the system works fine -- but the business grinds to a halt.

It's even worse for changes that don't involve technology, such as culture change, the roll-out of a new corporate strategy, or the introduction of new cost-cutting measures. Often these are not tested at all -- or only in part, at the end of the process, in some form of 'pilot' program, when it is too late and too expensive to change anything substantive. If you want to maximize the chances of your change initiative succeeding, here are five tips that you might want to consider when thinking about introducing a change.

1. Test the business, not just the system Sometimes called 'end-to-end' testing, this involves testing out the whole chain of events and possibilities from the start to finish -- the whole sales and delivery operation from a customer inquiry to payment arriving in your bank, for example. After all, you are trying to change the business -- you should probably check that you're succeeding.
2. Test early, test often Testing is usually done towards the end of the change project, when time is tight and fixing things is expensive. Much better to test each aspect of the change as it is produced, and to revise your design as you go.
3. Build testing into your change project Make sure that each aspect of the change has a quality standard and that you have determined how you will test it before you begin. Testing should be part of everyday working, rather than a big deal at the end
4. Test to fail Karl Popper, the famous philosopher, proved logically that experiments (or tests) never prove anything -- they can only disprove. So a good test regime can't prove that that your change is perfect, but it will reveal lots of failures. Such failures are great: they tell you what to fix.
5. Run Hypotheticals workshops You may have seen one of these on TV a few years ago, testing out a political or foreign policy scenario. Round a room are people representing every stage of a particular process. A moderator presents a scenario -- or 'hypothetical' -- and the relevant person in the room take the group through what they would do in the situation, before transitioning to the next person in the process. It's a good way to test the exceptional events or when things go wrong, to validate the logic and coherence of your exception processes, to uncover where issues can fall between cracks, and to educate everyone about the new way of working.

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