Your technology project is completed. Your go live date is imminent. You have committed serious time and effort to changing your processes, and making sure they get implemented in your new technology appropriately. Your delivery method is changing and people will need to use the new processes, portals, and workflows starting tomorrow. Suddenly you realize that all your effort was for nothing. You have not spent enough time in change management.
At the end of the day, it’s all about user adoption. Your employees, managers and other end users have to be excited about the system, but they also need to be well educated in how to use the system. If not, they at least need to know how to get help, and often this help needs to be easily accessible and informative.
You really need to count on your end users to make the project successful. If they don’t have good adoption, you won’t end up with the type of ROI you’re expecting, but you also will end up with many sub processes that managers have implemented to get around your process.
Organizations get so wrapped up in the implementation of technology that change management seems to be an after thought. And your response right now is to say “not in my company.” Well let me tell you that you’re wrong.
Most organizations I go to think that change management is the simple communication of a new (insert project here) and some training to go along with it. However, ignoring the underlying philosophy behind change management and only applying the tactical principles is dangerous. Change management msut change behaviors. If you only communicate and train without thinking about the specific audiences, what they want and need, and how they operate in their day to day work lives, you’ve missed the point of change management. In the end, they may know what to do, and they may know how to do it, but they won’t be engaged and they won’t have adopted your project.
Engage a change management expert. Wasting $M’s on a project just to see it die a slow death is not fun, and it’s not in your organization’s financial interest.
