Making Change Stick

Working hard on project management is only part of the battle. Ensuring you engage appropriate change management is required to make that hard work count and allow organizational changes to stick. Here are elements of a sound organizational change management strategy:

Develop a robust education strategy. Like every successful project starts with careful planning, effective change implementation demands thorough education planning. Ensure people receive the knowledge they need, precisely when they need it. Change initiatives often falter due to two major education pitfalls: poor timing and lack of adaptability. Training delivered too early is forgotten by implementation day, so schedule training as close to rollout as possible. Build your education plan by identifying learning requirements, preparing backup delivery methods, and clarifying how users can access help. Remember, not everyone learns the same way. Different processes, varying levels of skill and experience, and norms can render a single education approach ineffective. Create lasting training materials like video recordings and system demos to provide ongoing, accessible education and accommodate diverse learning styles. Finally, adapt your training delivery to meet learners where they are, just as you would when managing any complex project.

Fully utilize your user champions! Education alone isn’t enough for successful implementation. It is vital to have dedicated user champions—people who understand their business areas that you’ve invested extra time in educating. But that isn’t all! You must ensure these champions are appropriately distributed and empowered. Plan for about one champion per department or, in larger groups, one for every twenty people. This may seem ambitious, but significant change requires equally significant support at implementation. One organization I worked with had great champions, but they were all in the head office while most users were in field locations! Your champions need to be where your people are. Beyond ensuring you have champions positioned correctly, it’s also good to have backup support in other areas. Ensure your help desk is ready, your documentation is accessible, and your escalation paths are clear.

Be strategic about your implementation phases. Being thoughtful about when changes are made is essential to ensure implementation success. The system upgrade you want to deploy might coincide with the busiest business period, or unexpected integration issues might require adjustments to the rollout sequence. Experience managing complex projects has taught that trying to implement everything simultaneously creates more problems than it solves. Focus on Day 1 change activities separately from Day 1+X change activities. Day 1 represents a change in core functionality—the essential changes people need to do their jobs. Day 1 +X represents a second wave of improvements that can come once the initial changes are stabilized and embedded. Embrace a phased mindset, leading to better adoption instead of overwhelming people with too much transformation simultaneously.

Focus on the big picture rather than getting overwhelmed by individual issues. When implementation problems surface—and they will—view them as data points rather than disasters. Let user feedback guide you to system improvements you can make. Consider it valuable intelligence when resistance from certain areas reveals underlying process issues. Convert the stress of dealing with implementation bumps into excitement about problem-solving and organizational learning. Remember that significant change initiatives create broad organizational improvements. If you aren’t getting a flood of calls from everywhere, you should know that your change is probably working. Don’t focus too much on the little bits of “tragic” and keep a broad view of the magic your change is making across your business. This perspective will enhance your implementation success and help your changes stick!