As enterprises approach organizational change management (OCM) initiatives, understanding first how to measure results and achieve success in this space is all-important. One common perception held by businesspeople is that the ultimate success of OCM—outside of achieving the goal that motivated the change, and the change management---can be assessed by a lack of disruption it’s seen as causing to the business, by minimal “noise,” and continued customer success,
However, OCM is also about communication, training, and education. It involves the psychology of how to guide and champion teams through understanding, adopting, and adjusting to ever-evolving technologies and processes. Change within an organization must be consistently visible and ever-present, so long as the change is strategic and designed to accelerate an organization’s market competitiveness. Through intentional steps of preparation, implementation, and follow-through, professionals who lead OCM efforts must help an organization successfully change to reach its intended future state.
In a recent conversation with ASUG, Susan Stone, Founder and Principal Consultant at Dandelion Experience, an IT services and strategy company, noted that internal stakeholders on the receiving end of change management efforts that she’s overseen generally understand what’s coming, their role and tasks, and how a change might impact them. They can quickly and easily find the right information and to plan their daily work accordingly. In short, they are set up for success.
Ahead of her speaker session, “Mastering the art of organizational change management,” at SAP Sapphire & ASUG Annual Conference, Stone discussed change management best practices she has learned from her nearly two decades of experience in managing ERPs. Here are her ingredients for successful OCM projects.
Ingredient 1: Effective Communication
“People first!” Stone emphasized, encouraging enterprises to keep internal stakeholders at the center of OCM efforts, ensuring the right people receive the right communications at the right time.
Stone said that she has witnessed instances of organizational change management where certain people or departments are excluded, by design, from the early phase within a communication plan. “This is a cautionary measure,” she said. “People don’t want to communicate to too many stakeholders too soon and cause chaos in the environment.”
While this instinct is well-intentioned, Stone said she advises enterprises to communicate early and often when it comes to OCM efforts, emphasizing the importance of respecting colleagues’ time. Everybody has a responsibility to their “business as usual” functions and tasks they have to manage already in order to “keep the lights on,” she reflected.
Stone also instructs individuals tasked with managing OCM projects to share and seek feedback the timelines for when change is expected to happen, to ensure it’s understood how much time each group of end users should set aside. By giving these stakeholders a “heads up”, OCM leaders can help end users prepare, communicate to their teams, plan appropriately, and block their calendars for key knowledge share meetings. By taking these steps, Stone said end users will be ready to engage and adopt when needed.
Ingredient 2: Project and Communication Governance
Stone also recommends that enterprises adopt a “rigid flexibility” approach to change management, further noting that, for an effective program, “project governance is key.”
This approach is especially important when enterprises already have a center of excellence (CoE) for successful past projects. Project sponsors, owners, managers, should look—both internally and externally—at how successful OCM communications have been executed in the past. She encourages leaders to leverage those insights to inform and potentially establish a norm for distributing OCM communications.
Using proven and familiar methods is a force multiplier and additionally helps with cost avoidance. Leadership often sees OCM as a cost with no return of investment (ROI) and, consequently, they stress the importance of keeping OCM activities lean.
With that in mind, Stone said that any software implementation or update project must have an ultimate goal of a hard ROI. OCM efforts help enterprises gain the efficiency needed to maximize ROI; however, without communication norms established while undergoing the change, time ends up being wasted, making the ROI that much harder to achieve.
Ingredient 3: Stakeholder Support
According to Stone, cross-organizational collaboration is also vital to OCM efforts.
Stone often works one-on-one with key project stakeholders, conducting an interview process to understand the company’s culture, their current technology landscape, and improvement areas. This process includes understanding how to best work with individuals and the various culture points within an organization. These points can be a whole organization, department, team, specific person, or a particular company location.
When managing OCM transformation, Stone often hears specific groups within an organization articulate frustration that another group is “still running independently” and not merging with other teams. Stone believes this type of organization-specific insight is necessary to have in order to create a successful OCM plan. There’s so much about a successful project implementation that depends on the enterprise, industry, and culture, Stone said.
However, when it comes to engaging stakeholders—whether in office or in person—Stone said there is no single correct tool or method to conduct an implementation. “There’s no panacea,” she said. However, stakeholder interviews are critical for every single project she’s worked on: “I've never been able to do an effective change management roll out without having done the stakeholder interviews.”
In those interviews, Stone focuses on seeing the whole landscape of where the project will have support. “If you don’t have any executive sponsor supporting this project, you’re basically saying this isn’t tied to our strategy,” Stone said. Peers don’t see the importance of OCM efforts and assume it’s a passion project. They’ll continue to focus on their essential tasks, and the transformation project falls by the wayside.
“If you don’t have people to do the work in alignment and ready to support the project or initiative it doesn’t matter if you paid for the software, it’s not getting implemented,” she said. “Or it is at least not getting implemented quickly, efficiently, and well.”
Ingredient 4: Budgeting Strategy
According to Stone, it is highly important for enterprises to allocate appropriate financial resources to OCM efforts. Put simply? “Show me the money,” she said.
SAP software is a large strategic investment for organizations, and the implementation of this software requires budgeting with this in mind. Provided an SAP solution is in line with an organization’s long-term strategy, leaders are asked annually to ensure there is sufficient budget planning—but not more than is needed—to cover the necessary resources, including SAP licenses, system integrator costs, third-party integration costs.
Oftentimes, the OCM efforts necessary to drive a message forward and safeguard user adoption—by delivering effective, right-sized communications, training, and knowledge management associated with the technology—comes at a cost. And, unfortunately, if there are project overruns, these efforts are often the first to have their budgets slashed.
Still, change management efforts don’t happen in a vacuum.
OCM experts can provide the necessary psychology that helps business users learn how to get a project off the ground while also managing the knowledge, resources, and communications needed for it to be successful. While budget conversations do have to happen, cuts should always be intentional and strategic.
Stone recommends technology leaders look at their five-year strategy and be proactive about acknowledging that certain investments will have to be made at various points in the change management process. Leaders should consider how to flex and scale their budgets, while making room for OCM at the stages where it matters most.
By planning like this, leaders can also revisit goals along the way. If, for example, there was a plan to automate core reporting that an individual performed daily, leadership can follow up to see if that goal has since been achieved. Then, they can reallocate the person who previously performed these manual reports and move them to an area where they will thrive and offer greater value to the company.
“Lean is good, for operations,” Stone said. “However, for growth, my former CEO told me, ‘You cannot save your way to prosperity. You have to spend money to make money.’ Implementing solutions to keep you lean takes money up front, in order to realize longer-term benefits and efficiencies.”