5 ways we can help simplify change for you and your business
Do you often get feedback from your business colleagues like:
“I wish you had more time to focus on my team’s problems”
or
“a particular business process is holding us back because an IT system is not up to the task, why haven’t you fixed it?”.
Do you want to improve how your IT team is perceived by the wider business and your customers?
The best way to do that is to improve your social currency by implementing a clear business change management strategy.
That may sound difficult but in reality, by using some common sense and understanding your business and its culture, the rewards are tangible, can be measured, and positions you and your team in a much better light without a huge expenditure in time and money.
Here are 5 key points to address to start to make that happen:
1. Communicate what’s in it for me.
There is no point in implementing a project if no-one knows about it. You need to get the message out there.
It’s absolutely essential the senior leadership teams are involved in change projects and have been bought into them so they can help drive and be sponsors of the change.
Having your CEO or CIO stand up in a company town hall and showcase a project as well as explaining its importance is invaluable to get momentum and buy-in across the business.
Remember you need to communicate in the appropriate way to your audience, and multiple times as everyone is busy with their day jobs and might miss a post in the company newsletter.
2. Assess and measure changes in adoption.
To address change concerns and smooth the fear curve you need to know about your organisation, teams and people.
You need to know what makes them tick and what their concerns are so you can plan accordingly. There is also no point introducing a new IT product if it doesn’t align with the business needs and meet their current and future ways of working.
You can do this by establishing your organisations change maturity, confidence with technology, communications channels, training preferences and the impact it will have on the current ways of working.
Then, follow this up with key stakeholders’ views on project knowledge, given time for a project, preferred communication methods, project alignment, and the importance of the project to them.
Both can easily be achieved using the BEE Insights application.
This information is key to planning your project specific business change approach, identify bottlenecks and problems which need to be overcome before your organisation can hum.
There is no point (or should I say little point), in spending time, money and effort into improving your business change readiness if you can’t measure the improvement so you can shout about it later.
We use our ABC Scorecard assessment before and after a project to check what has worked and we should adjust to improve our process for next time.
Feedback loops are vital to improving processes over time, so be sure to build that into your planning.
3. Sell your project, it won’t sell itself.
Did I mention previously that repeating a message is key before it starts to sink in?
Explain why a project is happening, what is being done, who it is impacting, how it will work, and when. Never forget when. It’s almost always the first question people will ask.
Get that colleague in the business who everyone knows to talk about the project on video and discuss why it’s such an improvement.
Put banners on your portal, mention it in your company newsletters and make sure people have slides they can share with their teams to show the benefits of what’s in it for them.
Identify, and create specific relevant use cases for people impacted by a project on how their jobs will change, and why this change is for the better.
You know why a project is happening, so should everyone who is impacted (and even those who aren’t).
4. Create a champion network to support everyone.
This is vital to spread information regarding a project, help answer questions, and to have ‘on the ground’ support embedded in your business processes.
Do you know the reception a project manager gets when he tries to sell a change? Someone’s actual manager in the business gets a far better reception, but do you know who is best?
That person someone goes to who they know and trust to understand what is actually going on. They’re the influencer who needs to be identified and who needs to support champions to spread the word as to why a change is occurring. If you can identify those people, you can truly start to see massive improvements in project delivery and reap the rewards by communicating with them in the style they want, with the information they need to get them on-board.
We use our Social Network Analysis Assessment to do this in our BEE Insights application, all nicely visualised in diagrams and easy to embed in presentations of course.
You work in your organisation, if it’s relatively small you probably already know who these people are, so speak to them and get them on-board.
5. Train and support people in the way they prefer.
Don’t just do webinars. Do webinars, self-paced portals, drop-in sessions, follow up sessions.
Ensure the support team and champions have even more training and access to experts in a timely way.
Give people PDF’s, online training courses with the material in every manner that they want to consume.
Video demonstrations and hands-on exposure to systems work particularly well in our experience.
Make sure your support processes are smooth and fast. Do not leave people waiting at the end of a phone line on hold, or having SLA’s of 5 days before getting a response.
Every second counts as each blocker means people start to consider alternative solutions.
It’s vital that people know where to go to get the answers they need in the way they prefer to have questions answered and training delivered.
You want to remove barriers to learning and what better way than to give people the opportunity to learn in a way they want.
By doing this for each project, system and process you deliver you can create a repeatable strategy which is customised to your organisation.
Guess what, once people understand the approach is consistent, can see the results and benefits (Because you’ve measured them, and have a track record of delivery) they will not only buy into the approach but praise it and it’s transparency to their colleagues. Consistency is key, as people don’t like change, and will want to see the same approach time and time again.
All of which fosters a great result for you, and you guessed it, improving how your team is perceived by everyone they work with, giving you improved social currency.
Be careful how you spend it!
If you’d like to discuss how Simplify Change uses this same approach with the BEE Methodology to deliver business change in more detail please get in contact with us, we’re happy to help!