Incremental and gradual change always seems like the slowest way to effect change in a large company – until you’ve tried all the other ways. However, training and recruiting SR&ED Champions for key points in your organization is one approach that promises to accelerate effective change.
What do I mean by the phrase “SR&ED Champion”? I mean a person who:
- is both knowledgeable about and experienced with the program criteria and claims process,
- has embraced the strategic importance of the program, as it relates to their own technical or operational domain, and
- is able and willing to engage, persuade, and lead others toward the same conclusions.
How do you persuade an organization that, done properly, SR&ED is well worth the effort, if the organization is unfamiliar with (or effectively uncommitted to) the SR&ED program? Any organization can undermine an unfamiliar program by the simple expedient of doing a half-hearted job of its initial attempts to introduce it. Doing something badly is often the proxy for refusing to do it at all. Every new idea or thing is in a fight to the death with the old ways of working. It is infinitely easier to build a new SR&ED process into a small and growing company than it is to introduce the same changes to a large firm.
Organizations resist change exponentially, I think, in ways that somehow exceed the inertia or resistance of the individuals who make up the organization. Large organizations resist change on a grand, unimaginable scale – simple human resistance is augmented by technical, procedural and policy complexities, not to mention economic barriers, internal and external politics, and inter-personal, organizational and stakeholder issues. Almost any reason you can think of… and many that you can’t imagine … will stand in the way.
Even if, like the Pharaoh of Egypt in a certain Hollywood movie, one could decree, “So let it be written – so let it be done”, the real effective change would be a long time in coming. Compliance always lags behind policy, and achieving agreement on the best policy is usually an uphill struggle all its own.
This is where the SR&ED Champion idea comes into its own. (Of course, the very idea of pursuing and adopting such an approach assumes a level of leadership buy-in that is a-typical of many organizations.) The idea is that certain people, key stakeholders with the right skills, have the ability to really accelerate change. Among these people are: the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), key technical architecture or product development primes, key financial leadership, and key project/program planning and project management primes.
Even given a decree from Pharaoh (or the CEO), it’s hard to achieve effective compliance at any level without the engagement of such strategic champions – and you need them all for different reasons.
To be continued...
Bruce Madole