This article provides an overview of Organization Change Management (OCM)

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1 This article provides an overview of Organization Change Management (OCM) Purpose The aim of this article is to provide a framework for managing and coordinating change, and engendering engagement with and commitment to the implementation of HRIT systems. The greatest risk to the successful implementation of an enterprise-wide system is the failure to take into consideration major aspects of OCM like; poor communications, inadequate training or insufficient workforce planning. This can lead to a lack of acceptance of business changes and poor performance at the end-user level. In some cases, it can result in failed or delayed implementation. This article provides a framework for minimizing the impact of these factors on the project and ensures that all employees affected by the implementation receive assistance to help them manage change in their area. The overall objective of OCM is to successfully enable the customer and impacted stakeholders to perform throughout the change. Enabling stakeholders to perform through changes to roles & responsibilities, processes and systems requires actions that are based on the impacted individuals and the changes they are impacted with.

2 OCM Framework The main deliverables of OCM are gathered in the OCM Framework.

3 A short description of the deliverables: Change Management Strategy The way in which change management is approached. Change readiness Assessment Ensures readiness levels for organizational, process, and technology change. Pulse organization for readiness levels and gaps through surveys and focus groups. Organizational Impact Analysis Identify all people, process, technology changes to increase understanding of impact and allow time to seize improvement opportunities. Sponsorship Define and engage sponsors to increase support and acceptance of the changes to realize sponsor ownership of cross-functional operations. Communication Management Ensure all stakeholders are provided the right information at the right time through the most appropriate and credible channels to realize change acceptance. Organizational Design & development Design roles/jobs to support new business processes and system implementation. Identify critical knowledge, skills, and attributes required by 'To-be' jobs.

4 Training Management Identify training/development needs of users and enable them to successfully execute new roles and responsibilities, follow new business processes, and use the new system. Business Involvement & Ownership Generate awareness, understanding, buy-in, and commitment of the changes for all business owners through communications and active involvement in the implementation process. Organization management strategy In order to have this strategy in place a couple of steps must be delivered: Stakeholder analysis: Identifying the key stakeholders Identifying stakeholder characteristics Mapping the stakeholders Create the change charter, also named a project initiation document according to PRINCE2, that covers: Mission and rationale Goals and objectives of OCM Critical success factors Impact on other change programs in the organization Create the OCM organization

5 Change readiness assessment As a starting point for OCM it is wise to star with a change readiness assessment for instance by means of a survey. Beneath an example: A survey will be designed to collect business readiness information from the business. The survey will consist of a number of business readiness questions; each requiring a rating on a five point Likert Scale. The questions will be designed specifically to address business readiness issues that are relevant. These issues are: HRIT Benefits Leadership Impact on local roles, jobs and organization Documented processes and procedures Local implementation planning Data Training

6 The five point Likert Scale will measure the state of readiness regarding the Change Acceptance Curve (CAC). This tool states there are five steps individuals initiate when encountering change: unawareness, awareness, understanding, acceptance and commitment. Unawareness: Stakeholders do not know that change is going to happen. Awareness: Stakeholders know that change is imminent. They don t know yet what will be the benefits coming from the change. Understanding: Stakeholders can explain the impact of the change on them and on their organization. Acceptance: Stakeholders have a positive attitude towards the change and of the changes that will affect them. They are willing to give it a try.

7 Commitment: Stakeholders will champion the changes associated with the change to their peers and will do everything in their power to make it work and deliver the expected benefits in their organization. Next to this survey it is practical to perform an organizational impact analysis. Organizational impact analysis The basic approach to understand the impact on the organization is by making an AS-IS and TO-BE situation. The comparison of these two situations will result in an identification of change and the scope. An Example is using the following model to cover the impact analysis Organization strategy: is the provision and choice of alternatives on main principles. The strategic decisions are made for a long-term period and form the main point for decisions on a short term period. Strategic objectives: the milestones an organization aims to achieve in order to realize it is strategy. Process: is a related activity which applies and transforms resources into services and products and is often time-follow-neat-driven. The comparison

8 between the As-is processes and To-Be processes can be done during the business process workshops. Technology: is meant the automated support to business processes. Based on the system architecture it will be known what information gathering will smoothen and what not. Based on that, the impact on the manual activities will be determined. The outcome of this exercise is input for the people change. Organization structure: the collection of components of which the organization consists and the relation between those different components. Individuals and roles: are the special tasks and responsibilities an employee has in the organization. Related to people there are two organizational elements. These are: the skill set of the individual (knowledge, skills) and the role the individual is fulfilling in the organization. Sponsorship Sponsorship means that individual managers in the organization take on the temporary role of providing the formal authority by which changes are made. The reason for this is that in OCM, the normal hierarchy of management control is often broken as the project stretches across many parts of the organization. This hierarchy is replaced with sponsorship. For OCM, it is important to have a good understanding of the nature of sponsorship and carefully assist and manage the various sponsors in the project. This is the reason it is important to make a clear identification of the various sponsors. There are four types of sponsors:

9 1. Initiating sponsor that starts the project 2. Key sponsor the most senior manager who can resolve the stickiest of problems 3. Sustaining sponsors is a small group of managers whose support is critical and who have sufficient impact to unblock most problems 4. Secondary sponsors managers whose support is needed, albeit at a limited level Communication management The communication objective is to specify and adapt the communication to the different stakeholder needs with the purpose to engage and enact the change. The objective of the communication is to build sufficient support for the changes that are envisaged as part of the change program to allow these changes to actually take place successfully. Ensure clear, timely and effective communication Support the overall transition effort for the replacement of the current HRIT system; Background Reasons options Supporting business initiatives A fair transparent process Maintaining program quality Move towards the new direction

10 Organizational design and development Design and development involves a planned process of change in which one aligns the structure and culture of the organization in response to change. The purpose of organizational design and development is to change the beliefs, attitudes, values and structure of the organization to optimize organizational performance. The steps of organizational design & development are: Defining the scope of the system to be re-designed Defining the environmental demands Evolving a vision statement Enlightening organizational members Developing the change structure Conducting socio-technical analysis Preparing re-design proposals Implementing recommended changes Evaluating the changes or re-design Training management Training management needs to provide an overview of training needs and activities which provides the employees of the organization the necessary skills to work with the new system. Training management identifies the target groups and training activities.

11 Target groups The target groups for this project are: Project team Super users Key users IT department HR management HR employees Managers Employees For each target group different objectives concerning training needs have to be defined. Training activities Training activities are dependent also on the choices that are made how to format training activities. This is also dependent on the various target groups but also on individual learning curves. A number of variations are: On-line training Class room training Workshop approach

12 Business involvement and ownership Greater involvement leads to a greater sense of ownership of the process. Greater ownership leads to a stronger commitment to the priorities that are identified in the priority setting process. This must be the result of the OCM Framework. Aside of that OCM must be seen as a part of the compete project of implementing the new HRIT system. This requires that all the parts of the framework fit in the project approach and that business involvement and ownership is primarily set up by means of the project approach. About the author This article was written by Gijs Houtzagers of Focus HCM Solutions. Gijs combines no-nonsense project management, functional knowledge with strong project controls according to PRINCE2 and the ASAP or Scrum implementation method. Gijs has over 15 years of experience full life cycle implementations of a.o. ERP systems (SAP and PeopleSoft), all within planning and budget, local in the Netherlands as well as international. He also acted as management consultant and principal consultant on HRIT and CRM for various customers and as manager and director for various companies. Want to know more? You can contact Gijs via his LinkedIn Profile.