It was a Friday. A humid summer one in Boston.

Myself and the other workstream leads were exasperated with our Dev team.

“You can’t play Jenga with a house of cards,” our business lead said.

We were in the final push of an 18-month journey to bring a new CRM platform to thousands of professionals located in every corner of the world. This was my first foray as a change management lead.

In many ways, the project had been a success so far. Strong sponsorship. Sufficient funding. Solid team. Engaged and committed stakeholders.

System development, however, was another story. The biggest issue was the lack of transparency when issues were hampering the team’s progress.

On this Friday, we were notified that our training environment had crashed. Although they were confident they could get it ‘back’ in time for our global training to begin on Monday, we were skeptical.

There were decisions to make right now.

What should we do about next week (live training in Boston, London and Singapore)? And what should we do, overall, about our plan to prepare users in person, with a classroom style, hands-on-keyboards experience?

You can’t play Jenga with a house of cards.

I couldn’t unhear those words.

My focus was on the long term success of this $30M investment, and that depended on adoption, which hinged on positive stakeholder experiences. That had been the way we ran our program for the past 2 years.

So what did we do?

We started by canceling the following week’s training. A difficult but necessary decision. A risky training system was too big a chance to take.

Early the next week, we made what would turn out to be the best under pressure decision we made on that project. While our dev folks were saying “everything should now be fine,” we weren’t convinced. The word “should” was worrisome.

We scrapped the entire 5-week global live training program and set out on a plan “B”. Do over.

We replaced the instructor-led, classroom-based model with a completely web-based program. That was something to undertake at the time. Today, that would often be plan “A.” Not then.

In the span of a few days, we developed a “good enough” product to bring to the masses. And put in place an extensive support model to provide better coaching and assistance — user-led training isn’t as rich in content so we expected more support would be needed by our users. We were right.

It was a collaborative effort between business people, subject matter experts, IT folks, our trainers, extended project team, power users and our core team.

Reasons for success: (1) we gathered as much information as we could, (2) we were practical about what “could” be done, (3) we were honest with our stakeholders about what had happened and how we would fix it (and we apologized), (4) we worked day and night to make it right, and (5) we thanked and rewarded the team of people who made it happen. I had a lot of thank yous to our process leads, their teams, our consultants, and my team…

As with anything related to change – you have to put people first. If you do that, good things happen. And while you still have a lot of work to do, you’ve got people working together toward the goal.

If you can remember who you’re there for, and just get it done, you’ll usually be pretty satisfied with the results.

That’s what we did.

Have a great week!