7 Keys to successful Organizational Change Management Why Your CRM Program Needs Change Management and Tips for Getting Started
CONTENTS 2 Executive Summary 3 7 Keys to a Comprehensive Change Management Strategy 6 Conclusion #1: Strategy and Planning #2: Sponsorship and User Alignment #3: Process Re-engineering #4: Communication Planning #5: Engagement Planning #6: Training Development and Delivery #7: Measurement and Optimization EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Why Does Organizational Change Management Matter? Introducing a new CRM program? Good for you there are a lot of benefits that can come from that, including increased growth, improved customer engagement and greater efficiency to name a few. But a new CRM program isn t just about implementing a new technology. It s also about aligning people, processes and technology with your overall program strategy. When done correctly, the result should be true transformation. However, independent analyst firm Gartner, Inc. finds that IT projects that are intended to deliver new capabilities and better business outcomes for example, through ERP, supply chain management, CRM, knowledge management and other deployments are falling short of achieving the desired strategic business outcome. This is largely due to slow rates of user adoption, and a slow rate of users becoming proficient in using the new solutions. 1 While there are a lot of components that go into the success of a CRM project, as Gartner indicates, one of the most overlooked is organizational change management. Beyond user adoption, change management impacts many other key project areas. For example, without strategic change management efforts, those in the roles closest to execution are often the last to know what is happening with accuracy and clarity, and this lack of transparency can lead to speculation, rumors and a demotivated workforce. Additionally, a lack of change management makes it difficult to overcome the WIIFM (what s in it for me?) element that comes with any new program. Change may be the new normal, but it doesn t always mean people accept it willingly. As the change process begins, people will look for their place to determine how they can maintain relevancy in the new order. A proper change management program can help make clear what that looks like from the start. Gartner echoes the importance of strategic change management efforts, writing: Many hours of productivity time often go to waste while people try to come to terms with: (1) why they have to change the way they work; and (2) how to change and be proficient in the new way. Productive hours also are wasted as employees spend valuable time seeking help from each other on how to use the new tool, or calling the help desk for assistance. This lost productivity time comes at a cost to the organization. 2 7 Keys to Successful Organizational Change Management
The duration of lost productivity time can be prolonged by resistance when people don t understand why and how. Resistance leads to very low adoption rates, which may negatively impact other areas of the business. For example, slow adoption of a new CRM solution that is critical to a client-facing interaction may lead to a slow and ineffective handling of customer issues, which, in turn, may lead to dissatisfaction and eventual churn in the customer base. 2 As these points illustrate, the key to helping people embrace change is developing a strategy with specific themes that describe the change, why it s happening and how it will help both your organization and your users achieve their goals. These themes must be aligned with your core measurements for project success as well as your organization s overall mission, vision and goals. As a result, developing a comprehensive change management strategy is a critical success factor in both the short and long terms since it can ensure solution longevity, drive user adoption and acceptance and enable effective measurement of program accomplishments. As you develop this change management strategy, it s essential to consider more than just training. According to Gartner, the assumption made in many [IT projects that are intended to deliver new capabilities and better business outcomes, like CRM] is that a few days of training after going live will suffice in equipping users with enough knowledge to use the new solutions. While training after going live is necessary, it is only a small part of the process and discipline of managing change. In reality, the impact of IT projects on how people work, how ready they are for the new deployments or how soon they can be proficient and productive can be far-reaching, and must be mitigated through organizational change management practices. 3 So what does it take to build a best practice change management strategy? This paper will outline seven areas of focus to consider. 7 KEYS TO A COMPREHENSIVE CHANGE MANAGEMENT STRATEGY #1: Strategy and Planning First and foremost, you need to determine your overall program readiness by conducting a pre-launch Organizational Readiness Assessment (ORA) assessment. Based on this assessment, you can then develop a formal change management plan that dictates approach, design, change execution and resource requirements. During this assessment, you also need to determine any issues that might impact user acceptance and review tactics that may or may not have worked in the past. The purpose of the ORA is to gain a deep understanding of end user, middle management and executive expectations, issues, obstacles and anxieties regarding the ensuing change. To conduct an ORA, use online user surveys or lead focus groups to identify pockets of resistance within the organization and their root causes. You can also use insights from the ORA to drive your communications, change planning and training strategies and to determine what your success metrics should look like. Ultimately, this information should help you better prepare for an effective implementation while mitigating risk and increasing user acceptance and adoption. In addition to providing your team with insight into the user mindset, the ORA can also provide users with a better understanding of the new program. As a result, the ORA is a very effective tool to foster employee engagement and awareness of the project. Furthermore, by providing this insight, you can empower users to support and participate in the new program. During this planning phase, Gartner recommends developing relevant objectives and identifying how your resulting change management strategy will help your organization. Specifically, the analyst suggests you consider short-term tactical needs, such as stabilizing a 3 7 Keys to Successful Organizational Change Management
given IT service, as well as strategic enablement objectives that relate to organizational goals. Failure to establish objectives that are relevant will undermine all subsequent activities and will increase the risk of failure. 4 #2: Sponsorship and User Alignment Involving stakeholders in the change management process as early as possible is important to the overall success of your efforts. To ensure regular involvement, host monthly sessions in which you share progress with stakeholders and set goals to help them carry out the change strategy. Your objective in hosting these sessions should be to keep stakeholders up to date on project status, provide them with the tools they need to be effective leaders and sponsors and discuss any issues that need to be resolved. Capture: Identify functional requirements, pain points, lost time, business rules, current state processes and future state processes. Analyze: Conduct a gap analysis to identify the differences between current state and future state processes and determine what you need to integrate into the new CRM system. Re-engineer: Identify areas for improvement, streamline business processes and prioritize and approve changes. This process mapping will allow you to identify value streams within specified processes, define critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs) from factbased metrics and define the true scope and impact of your new CRM program. As a result, it should help you create more effective and efficient processes that are based on best practices in order to cut waste and lost time. In turn, stakeholders should communicate the outcomes of these sessions with their users in order to keep everyone abreast of the direction and purpose of the CRM program and to actively demonstrate support for the new initiative. #3: Process Re-engineering Before beginning any development or implementation work, you need to understand what your current business processes are, how they are performing and how the new program can help reshape, streamline and standardize these processes. As a result, process mapping is a critical step in any change management program. It starts with identifying the current state of business processes and segmenting these processes by various levels, from high level business processes to functional requirements by department. At its core, process mapping is about discovering and reengineering. It should always include three key parts: Once you map your current processes and determine what s working and what s not, you can then begin to define and develop your ideal future state processes and workflows. Mapping both current and future state processes in this way aligns with Gartner s recommendation to implement a cultural change program that articulates what the end state should be and the reasons for the change. Gartner continues: The end state should not be seen as imposed, but, rather, as an inclusive process that encompasses all people affected by the change. This will enable many of those in IT to understand the destination and will provide IT leaders an opportunity to rally people behind the need for change. 5 As you develop these future state processes, be sure to create test cases and process flow charts to help ensure that they will meet the needs of your end users. Finally, be sure to document these processes so that you have information to which you can refer back to down the road. 4 7 Keys to Successful Organizational Change Management
#4: Communication Planning Effectively communicating your vision, reasons for the change, benefits to end users and long term goals is an essential part of change management. Doing so should raise awareness about the new program, set expectations about impending changes and help end users understand how the project will impact them. As you plan your communication tactics, be sure to consider which types of messaging and channels will prove most effective with your end users. For example, you might look at digital communication options via an internal intranet or social network, email campaigns, executive messaging, fact sheets, FAQs or monthly newsletters. Using a variety of delivery methods is important to ensure that all of your users hear the message in whatever way is most meaningful to them. Developing a Stakeholder Communications Plan Matrix will capture the who, what, when, how and why of your communications plan and ensure the cadence of your communications complements the timeline of the overall implementation and training at each phase of the project. Additionally, your plan should account for a variety of different communications throughout the entire lifecycle of your CRM program. This means that communication shouldn t end once your implementation is complete. Rather, you should continue to communicate program updates as they come about. Perhaps most importantly, if you make this communication two-way and establish a governance model to track all user questions and feedback, you can then use this information to identify and prioritize areas for future enhancements. Finally, all of these communications -- from the start of your program to ongoing messages -- should be branded. Branding the project signifies that the CRM program is a big deal that everyone needs to embrace. Be sure to include typical branding elements (e.g. project name, logo, tagline, colors, etc.) as well as other elements deemed necessary based on your organization s unique needs and objectives. You can even foster employee engagement upfront by hosting a contest to decide what these elements should be. #5: Engagement Planning Engagement planning ensures that your stakeholders are actively engaged and participate in planning activities throughout the program lifecycle. Successful engagement planning requires a commitment from your project team to engage with, listen to, build relationships with and respond to concerns from stakeholders. One common tactic to encourage participation from stakeholders in the long term is gamification. When done correctly, this type of regular engagement can help you validate business processes and best practices and ensure ongoing alignment. It is during the engagement planning phase of your change management efforts that you can create the type of inclusive environment recommended by Gartner. 6 Once the project has started, you can re-engage stakeholders by conducting a mid-point Readiness Assessment. This assessment should gather updated issues and opportunities that either weren t addressed in the initial ORA or have come up now that the project is moving forward. Additionally, it reinforces with stakeholders that they have a voice in the project, helping to further their engagement and buy-in for the new program. #6: Training Development and Delivery Training is often the first thing that comes to mind when people hear change management, and although it s not the only thing that needs to be included in your change management strategy, it is an important part of it. 5 7 Keys to Successful Organizational Change Management
To get started with training, you must first assess and define your training requirements based on user needs and preferences. Based on that assessment, you can develop a training curriculum, including materials, documentation multimedia tools and third party applications, that will guide your delivery. As you think through training, remember to consider your organization s culture, available resources and user preferences. Finally, you need to remember that training is never really complete. As Gartner cautions: Do not view the design and implementation of change management as a onetime event. Instead, adopt the perspective of continuous optimization embedded in the process, and keep stakeholders involved. People must be reminded that it is critical to look for improvement opportunities over time, and to be alert to changes in the business environment that will cause the process requirements to change. The process owner or manager should interact regularly with sales, customer service, project management, development and other groups that can help identify forthcoming changes in the business that will impact the change management process. When this happens, a service improvement plan should be assembled to revise the associated people, process, technology and business management elements, as required. 7 In order to satisfy the need for continuous change management, you should develop an ongoing learning plan to help drive regular system usage and adoption. This ongoing plan can also help users stay up to speed as you continue to make program enhancements. #7: Measurement and Optimization Last but not least, you need to measure the success of your CRM program. By demonstrating how your CRM investment supports your bottom line, you can help justify future investments to improve the program. In order to measure success and identify areas for improvement, you must first define key performance indicators and best practices during the strategy and planning phase of your project. Common areas to measure include user behavior, user adoption, program effectiveness and achievement of business outcomes. In addition to proactively understanding changes in the business, Gartner also recommends that the change management process owner and manager should track metrics that may serve as early indicators that something is wrong, such as the number of incidents arising from failed chances, and the business impacts of the incidents, such as lost revenue and brand damage, average time to implement changes and customer satisfaction regarding the value of change management. It is critical to include the voice of the customer in this equation to understand change management s performance when it comes to balancing process speed and risk management. Also in this instance, when opportunities are identified, a service improvement plan should be assembled to revise the associated people, process, technology and business management elements, as required. 8 Based on these findings, you can then measure your success against these metrics once you go live by conducting end user surveys, monitoring rates of acceptance and tracking performance against KPIs. CONCLUSION Don t Overlook the Value of Organizational Change Management If you re making the investment in a modern CRM program, you need to support that investment with a best practice change management strategy. Beyond your implementation of the new technology, a comprehensive change management strategy is critical to your program s success. 6 7 Keys to Successful Organizational Change Management
Without a change management strategy, your risk of a flawed implementation and low user adoption rates will increase significantly. In fact, in its report on the role of organizational change in IT project success, Gartner shares that ineffective organizational change management was cited in 45% of project failures by a recent Gartner/ Forbes survey. Gartner continues that research studies also show that the benefits of embedding organizational change management practices in the IT project life cycle far outweigh the costs and significantly increase IT project success rates. 9 As a result, the value that change management can bring to your CRM program in both the short and long terms simply can not be overlooked. Remember that the success of your CRM program is about your people, namely allowing them to work better and more efficiently. The CRM technology is merely the tool to help them be more successful -- it s what you do to encourage the use of that tool and how they actually embrace it that will help your organization grow. 1. Schoen, Mbula. Organizational Change Is Centric to IT Projects Success. 2. Schoen, Mbula. Organizational Change Is Centric to IT Projects Success. 3. Schoen, Mbula. Organizational Change Is Centric to IT Projects Success. 4. Spafford, George. Top Six Strategies to Optimize Change Management. 5. Spafford, George. Top Six Strategies to Optimize Change Management. 6. Spafford, George. Top Six Strategies to Optimize Change Management. 7. Spafford, George. Top Six Strategies to Optimize Change Management. 8. Spafford, George. Top Six Strategies to Optimize Change Management. 9. Schoen, Mbula. Organizational Change Is Centric to IT Projects Success. FIND OUT WHAT CLOUD SHERPAS CAN DO FOR YOU Our focus is on helping organizations meet all their cloud needs, including running business applications like messaging, collaboration and CRM in the cloud, developing custom cloud solutions using platforms and infrastructure as a service and integrating existing cloud solutions with other clouds and business systems. Let us help you leverage the cloud. Visit us online at www.cloudsherpas.com. 3525 Piedmont Road Building 8, Suite 710 7 Top 3 Reasons Atlanta, Why GA 30305 the Manufacturing Industry is Going Google 2011-2014 Google for Work Global Partner of the Year