Understanding the Change Acceleration Process Model (CAP)

Every product/service that a company delivers to the market inevitably goes through a transition phase which brings it to a state of improvement and overall better performance. However, this transition is commonly a problematic process that can take a long time to complete, and in some cases, it can even be completed incorrectly, with certain details getting dropped along the way. Change Acceleration Process (CAP) is a model designed to accelerate the transition state and ensure that products enter a state of improvement much faster than normal.

There are several important components to a successful CAP implementation, and paying attention to all of them correctly is crucial throughout the process. Most importantly, you need to ensure that you create a well-defined vision for the long-term development of the product, and define a clear reason for the change that’s being implemented in the product.

Justifying the Important Decisions

It’s also important that the need to change the product goes above a certain threshold, commonly referred to as the resistance to change. With every product, there is some inherent resistance to altering any of its properties, especially long-established ones that have been core features since the first inception of the product. This can make it particularly challenging to make major changes in that product, leading to prolonged transition stages and decreased long-term improvements in performance.

This makes it important to ensure that the company defines a clear reason for changing the product, backed by sufficient data and market research. This, in turn, means that you’ll need to have proper data collection practices in place, and work with experts who know how to actually wrangle all that information and do something useful with it. Benchmarking the product along its development steps is a good way to show how certain changes affect its overall status, but this can be tricky when you don’t have something concrete to benchmark against.

What Factors are Important for Success?

Another important point to define when working with CAP is the set of factors that will determine the true success of the product’s transition. These metrics can vary quite a lot from one company to another, and needless to say, they will also differ according to the various products in your portfolio. Understanding the performance of each product in its corresponding market is important here, as it’s the main factor you’re going to use to determine the winning conditions of the CAP implementation.

Keep in mind that those goals may change over time, as your understanding of the product and client requirements changes. It’s not rare that companies develop a better insight into the way their products exist on the market once they dig deep into their improvement programs, and you may end up with a set of goals that’s drastically different from what your initial analysis predicted.

And that’s fine, as long as it’s a decision backed by sufficient data, there’s nothing to worry about. Just make sure that you evaluate the product’s performance once the change is completed as well, in order to be sure that the new features actually match the needs of your clients.

Conclusion

Change Acceleration Process can be very beneficial when you want to ensure that your products are improved in a systematic way and that those improvements don’t take too long to arrive to the market. It can be a very useful tool in rapidly moving markets, which can be very dangerous to companies that are slow to adapt changes to their line-up, and it can easily help a business transition from a relatively idle state to one where they are constantly improving everything they can about their top offers.