Video: Lead Your Organization Through Technology Change

Transcript:

Kyle Haines: Good afternoon or good morning to everyone and welcome to our change management webinar series: Change Management in Action. We’re sharing actionable knowledge on how you can introduce critical elements of change into your technology projects.

Build focuses so much on change management because we think it’s central to preparing, equipping and supporting the individuals who are expected to adopt change. They’re expected to align technology to organizational goals.

How does change management support leadership, engage people along the way reduce frustrations, do all the things that Debbie is going to talk about in today’s webinar, as she talked about in the last webinar and in our upcoming webinar?

So today is the second session of a three-part series. The first one in case you missed it was about project planning and what you need to do to get ready for a technology change that’s coming. Today’s session is on the ways that you can lead your organization confidently during change-intensive projects.

And now that I’ve shared a bit about what we’re going to cover today, I’m really excited to introduce my colleague and fellow partner, Debbie Cameron. Debbie serves as our change lead on so many projects. She’s always someone that I can go to help me navigate change in the projects that I’m on, and I’m really excited for all of you to benefit from her experience as I do.

I’ll be monitoring Q&A in the background. Please feel free to add any questions. There’ll be some time for Q&A at the end. And with that I’m going to hand it over to you, Debbie.

Debbie Cameron: Hello, everyone! I’m Debbie Cameron for those that haven’t met me or have not attended a webinar with me. I’m a partner with Build Consulting. I’ve been doing management and IT consulting for more than 25 years.

I started my career with larger consulting firms, working for Arthur Anderson and Bearing Point. But along the path of my career, I want really wanted to find more purpose in my work. I found an arm within one of the large organizations that worked exclusively with nonprofits. I got to work with clients whose mission I believed in and loved, and I just fell in love with the nonprofit world.

I felt like I needed to learn what it was like to be inside the walls of a nonprofit, so I left consulting to work for the World Wildlife Fund for about four and a half years, leading their BB (Blackbaud) CRM implementation. And after that I found my home with Build. And it’s really been great, because I feel like, when I was with World Wildlife Fund, I learned what it was like to be on the other side of the consulting world. And now I can serve as an advocate for my clients, to help them navigate technology projects.

And I get to pursue my professional passion, which is change management. It’s really important for me to see my clients be successful in their projects.

And so many technology projects are not successful. When you do research on why that is, there’s a ton of reasons. But lack of change management is a big one, and I feel like that’s where I can help, and I’m hoping to help some of you here today.

Agenda: Lead Your Organization Through Technology Change

Our agenda for the webinar is pretty simple. Let’s

• Ground ourselves in change management, and why we need it.
• Introduce thoughts on tools that can help us execute change management during our technology projects and
• Learn how to leverage some of those tools during the implementation project.

What is Change Management, and Why?

So, for those who attended any of my past webinars, some of what I’m going to go over may sound a little familiar, but I think it’s always important to re-ground ourselves in what change management is, and why? It’s important, especially as we are likely moving through a busy day with lots of competing priorities. And before we dive into the details on ways to execute change management, let’s remind ourselves why we need it and what it is at Build.

We have two core beliefs that motivate us both to do this work and to approach it in the way we do.

1. The first is our belief that technology can empower organizations to both work more effectively and to change the world.
2. The second is that technology fails so often because we treat it like a baseball field in Iowa, one of my favorite analogies. We think if we build it, people will come. We get the shiny new technology. But we don’t recognize the need for the organization to get shinier, too.

Which leads me to a formula we use a lot. In fact, if you’ve attended any of my webinars or have worked with me, I’m sure you’ve seen this before, and that’s because I think it really makes the point. And it never seemingly gets old for folks, because everyone has lived a version of this.

OO+NT=EOO

Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization

And as I harken back to the slide that I shared earlier, the key is to find the right things to add to that formula that will make the outcome a transformed organization, because that is what’s critical to success.

More than 50% of nonprofit technology projects fail because the tech moves forward. But the organization does not.

Technology fails so often because we build that baseball field in Iowa, and we think people will come, and we get that shiny technology. But we don’t recognize that the organization needs to move IT along.

What can we add to this formula, what are the ingredients that are going to set that organization up for success?

Audience Questions and Issues from Registration

And I’m sure if you’re here today, some of you have lived this or are currently living through it. And that brings me to why folks are here today.

All of you have some technology projects on the horizon based on your answers to the questions that we asked when you registered for the webinar. It looks like there’s a good contingent that are in the planning stages, so I do encourage you if you missed my last webinar on change management during the planning phase, I encourage you to go back and give it a listen.

But I am excited that you’re here today because we’re going to talk about some cool ways to layer change management into your technology projects as they’re underway.

We also asked folks “when is your next technology project starting?” And this is really great, because it looks like if you’re not already on your way, you’re going to be starting the next 12 months. This is where I wish we could be a little interactive in in the in the presentation, because I would love to see how folks are doing who are already in their project, and it’s underway. I’d love to hear what folks are doing in the planning phases as they’re starting to look towards the project, and if change management is in there at all.

In the end I really hope today to offer some things you can bring into these projects. I always say it’s never too late to start change management. It just can’t be ignored.

Why Do Nonprofit Technology Projects Fail?

I mentioned earlier change management is a big component of why we see technology projects fail. And here’s the driver of why that’s the case.

A good deal of the failure rate of technology projects is related to the fact that we simply do not do a good job of anticipating the effect of these projects on the people that we’re supposed to help.

When these impacts hit them, we lose the hearts and minds of those that we serve, and as a result we don’t get the return on our investment we hoped for.

In a lot of cases for our clients, the organizations have already introduced a large change without an appropriate level of change management. So, they’ve already lost trust with their stakeholders, and they come to us looking for us to help them change that.

What are they looking for when they’re looking for change management? We like the definition by Prosci, which is a leading research and consulting company in the field of change management. Change Management is to prepare, equip, and support individuals to successfully adopt change.

Kyle Haines: There’s a there’s a couple interesting comments. One is

Sandy’s planning on a migration from Dropbox to SharePoint and OneDrive, and Ken also, what he said was, they’re working on how to deliver and train, for now and the future set and support process modifications to support change deployment, which sounds like a really quick project. (laughs)

Debbie Cameron: (laughs) Yeah, both of those actually sound very layered.

When we talk about change management, I think a lot of folks think it’s just about making it sound like it’s the best thing that’s going to happen to them and making everybody sound like it’s going to make them happy. And that’s not what change management is. It’s not about making everyone happy. I think a frequent mistake in change management is that it is about telling people that they’re going to be happy about this change and just continuing to put a positive spin on it. And that’s not really what’s going to happen. You’re never going to make everybody happy with the change. You’re never going to be able to achieve that if that’s what you think change management is.

What should change management look like in an organization?

We at Build believe it’s a concurrent work stream to any project, and it can be done by an internal resource or by a consultant. What it cannot be, and I think some of you will totally agree with this statement, what it cannot be is a side job of someone who is managing the technical change. It can’t be another thing the project manager is responsible for.

Oftentimes there’s a Technical Project manager and their focus needs to be on executing every aspect of the project. And it’s a lot to ask of one person to do both.

It’s also a question about capacity. The project manager will always have to have their project management responsibilities be their priority because they’re going to have a lot of pressure to carry it across from a timeline, budget, all of those perspectives.

When there’s competing priorities, and there’s one person who may or may not have all this capacity, what’s going to fall to the wayside is the change management side.

I also see Dan’s about to undertake a CRM replacement, and that’s also a very good project in need of change management.

Do Some Projects Need More/Different Change Management Than Others?

Kyle Haines: I didn’t know if you could see the chat I was going to prompt you, and you can say I’ll get to this, Kyle. I’m trying to get through the webinar. But I remember I asked you one time, many years about ago, about whether your perspective CRM projects needed greater change management than other types of projects. And hopefully, you remember what you said to me because I’m putting you on the spot. But I’m wondering, if you could hit on that at some point about change in CRM projects, specifically.

Debbie Cameron: Yeah, absolutely. And now is good a time as any.

I think CRM projects absolutely require more change management than a lot of technology projects. I think, when you’re really focused on requiring a behavior change, and you know, Sandy, you’re going to face this, too, as you’re asking folks to have a behavior change in that migration from Dropbox to SharePoint.

Your stakeholders have choices on whether or not to use the system when you implement an ERP system. You still need change management because you want to make your team successful, and you want them to feel like they’re supported through the transition a hundred percent. But at the end of the day the revenue has to get in the system the accounts payable and accounts receivable, all of those things they need to operate and exist in an ERP system, in order for the lights to stay on.

In a CRM, you’re asking folks to change their behavior about how they work and share information and collaborate with others. It’s a really, really large ask. You’re often moving people not from point A to Point B, it’s really point A to point G, and same with how they’re managing files and file storage. That’s going to be a big change in behavior. And it’s going to require a lot of attention, and a lot of care and feeding.

When Do I Need Change Management During a Project?

I talked about in the last webinar; you need it as early as possible, if that’s possible. But the important thing is to just make sure you have it, and that you continue it throughout the initiative.

I have seen a lot of start stop happen where there’s capacity, then there’s a lull in the project. We turn our time and energy to change management, and then we get busy, and we forget about it.

And that’s also why it’s really important to make the room and make the investment, to have a dedicated resource, internal or external, that’s going to focus on change management throughout the engagement. The minute you start and then you stop, it’s kind of forgotten. You’re going to start to lose people.

Change Management is all about the people, and it’s all about building trust, credibility, offering transparency.

Why Do We Need Change Management?

All of these things are connecting IT to the organization goals. Technology strategy is organizational strategy. One cannot fully succeed without the other.

Change management supports your leadership by providing them with the tools and resources they need to lead through change and support their teams in the transition. It engages with the stakeholders who you are asking to make the change, which in turn will reduce their frustration and help set them up for success, which is what we want in the end. Because if they’re not successful, we’re not going to be successful, and the project won’t be successful.

Change management introduces transparency into what is changing.

Knowing that helps us move together in a more consistent manner rather than having different pockets within an organization trying to figure out how to adapt to the change on the fly.

If things come to us by surprise, we are immediately going to just try to put one foot in front of the other and problem-solve in the moment. And when we do that just in a small pocket in the organization, we’re going to start doing things differently. And what’s that going to do? It’s going to affect the data.

And what are we really trying to do with all of these systems is to have a unified data unified strategy, all of that. The minute you start to have folks break off and do their own thing, once again we’re not reaching that that success that we need to, and that we set out to do.

We can’t argue with all the research out there that underscores this conclusion. I also think we’ve either seen it happen, or we’ve been a part of it. Change management is necessary to achieve any long-term success.

How to Build a Change Management Team

Kyle Haines: Debbie? Sandy asked another question. And I’ll give you a chance to read it. She was really interested in the point that you made about not having the project management lead also be the change management lead (and how you solve that situation.) At least that’s how I read it. My ears pricked up when you said that as well. I’m curious how you might respond to Sandy’s question.

Debbie Cameron: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think the best solution in that situation is when we’re getting ready to roll out something, a new technology, a new tool, even a new process, sometimes we look for folks to be our change agents or our super users. Or some form of leadership to help train their department or be their team’s person to ask questions about how the new system works.

We’re always asking folks to take on different roles in these projects. Right? So, find somebody in the organization who wants a new opportunity to learn, who wants some professional development. I have a slide on planning the change management when planning projects. There’s a slide there about qualities of a change practitioner. Maybe there’s somebody that really leans to into those characteristics. Identify that person. The project should not fall on the shoulders of just the project manager. There needs to be an understood investment of what projects are going to take.

So, find a resource that maybe has some capacity, or maybe doesn’t have capacity, but maybe something can be deprioritized, because they want this professional development opportunity. They want to learn. They’re interested in this type of work, they’re good with people, they’re good with understanding people, and I tap them for it.

I do understand that often resources are constrained. You can’t hire a consultant because you don’t have the financial resources, and I understand. But if you’re going to take on this sort of investment in this sort of project, it’s part of the cost, right? It’s not just the licensing fees. It’s not just the implementation, the cost of the implementation team. If you leave this cost out there’s ramifications, and so it just has to be considered part of the cost of the project.

Kyle Haines: Debbie, can I prove that I listen to you over the course of years?

Debbie Cameron: Sure.

Kyle Haines: Here is a Debbie Cameronism that I use all the time.

“You can either pay for change management now, or you can pay for it later. But you’re going to end up paying for it.”

Did I get it right?

Debbie Cameron: Yes, and I’m shocked that you listen to me!

Change Management Tools to Use During Implementation

Okay, so what does change management look like during the implementation phase of the project?

There are so many great and innovative tools to use throughout a project where we’re executing a change, specifically thinking about the implementation phase of a project.

I’ve listed some of my favorites, and I wish we had time to dive into all of them today, but rather than give you the one-inch overview of each tool, we thought it’d be a better use of our time together to do to do a deeper dive into two of them.

The two I’m going to focus on, which I think will be the most impactful if you want to take these ideas and bring them to your implementation project, are the change plan, because it’s broad and there’s a lot to it. I think it would be impactful.

And the second is impact analysis. And this is because I’ve had more than one client say that when we’ve worked with them in change management, and we ask what was the one thing they wouldn’t have wanted to do without, oftentimes they say the impact analysis.

I’m curious if you’ve ever used a change plan in a previous project.

Kyle Haines: We’ve got about half the people have responded so far. Give people little bit more time to respond. 

Debbie Cameron: Well, that is great. I’m thrilled to see that almost 50% of folks have used a change plan. I wish we could do a working session at the end of this, because I’d be so curious if what I’m about to share helps where there’s some familiarity and also for the 50% that have not, I hope you’re able to take away something from today.

An interesting statistic that I read recently, was of a survey done by Prosci. Of participants who had excellent change management programs in place, 88% met or exceeded the objectives they were out to solve. Only about 13% or one in 8 of those with poor change management programs met or exceeded objectives. So again, it’s just another survey, more research that supports the need for change management.

What is a Change Plan?

A change plan takes a lot of different forms. I’ve seen them be a one-page Word document. I’ve seen them in Excel, as kind of a Gantt chart of activities. I’ve seen a tool – there’s a company out there that does change plans and created this tool around them.

But what I believe, and what Build believes, a change plan is – it’s the living, breathing plan that is built. As you execute a change management framework, it’s really to plan for and understand and execute supportive intervention techniques throughout an engagement.

You want your change plan set up to really dig into what is changing and provide transparency into how the effort will support the transition all to be in alignment with what you’re trying to work to towards.

What are the objectives you’re trying to achieve with this project?

I have the sections of Build’s typical change plan outlined here. Let’s dive into what these categories are.

Change Framework

Change Journey

Approach and Timeline

Timeline

Tools

Management and Oversight

A change framework outlines the foundational structure and methodology guiding the change process. It’s typically aligned with a recognized model, ADKAR, Kotter. It sets the stage for how the change is going to be approached.

The change journey is about the stakeholder experience and emotions associated with the journey. It helps us visualize the progression of the change from their perspective, because change often evokes an emotional response in people, we can’t take that out of there.

Approach. What’s our strategy to leading the change? This needs to be specific to each organization or project, because it’s important that it’s tailored to the organization’s culture, its readiness and the complexity of the change.

Timeline, pretty self-explanatory. But what’s the important thing about a timeline and a change plan? For technology implementation projects, it’s about making sure that the change management timeline is interwoven with the implementation timelines. You want to make sure the milestones are aligning. You want to make sure you’re doing the right activities at the right time, and that they’re in the right sequence. And you just want to make sure that it’s really part of the implementation and not this track over on the side that only one or two people are engaging with.

Tools and intervention techniques. A list of the tools and resources we’ll use throughout the change process to engage with those impacted.

And finally, management and oversight is really focused on how we manage the change effort. What you’re looking for here is ensuring accountability. So, what happens if we miss Deadlines? Who can we escalate challenges to? If we’re running into a brick wall, or we have a problem we can’t creatively solve, who can we go to? And also, about when we’re going? You know those check in points to make sure that we’re making progress, and that we’re still in alignment with our project goals.

Build Consulting Change Management Framework

I’ll share with you the Build framework that we use. It’s organized into four phases designed to help organizations navigate the complexity of a change. It’s a systematic approach we developed, grounded primarily in precise ADKAR framework, but we do have some nods to Kubler Ross in there, which you’ll see as we go through the change plan.

It really works to ensure that every aspect of the change process is planned for and supported. It’s a way to organize the different activities and make sure we’re sequencing them right and celebrating milestones alongside an implementation.

And we created this particular framework because we wanted one that we would be able to scale to different size organizations, different scopes, and complexity of projects.

The phases of the framework are: Define Succes, Understand the Impacts, Engage, Iterate.

If you all are trying to determine a framework that would work for your organization or project. Let’s talk about what you might want to build into to your phases or framework.

Define Success

And so, in our define success phase, the objective is really to clearly articulate what success looks like for the change in its initiative.

A lot of times we start these projects and the success criteria that we’re working towards is successful launch. And that doesn’t really address the whole thing, right? We really want to identify goals, outcomes, success criteria and make sure we’re aligned on those items, because we want to make sure that what we’re working towards isn’t to just turning the system on and allocating user licenses to folks so that they start using the system, or they have the ability to use the system.

It’s about reaching the vision. So, what’s the vision, making sure we’re sharing it, making sure we’re articulating it, understanding what it looks like and making sure we’re aligned on it.

Activities in this phase are about developing a clear vision for the change, gaining alignment with leadership key stakeholders, establishing KPIs that we can measure against as the project is going on. My favorite tool is a project charter. And I think that is a tool that helps align both objective and subjective measures, talks about the problem statement. I think it’s a wonderful tool to use.

And all of these activities are about laying a foundation for the change process.

Understand the Impacts

When you move to understand the impacts, the objective is really about digging into what’s changing, identifying who will be affected by the change and specifically how. It really involves digging into the details and assessing the impacts on different groups and individuals.

A key activity in this phase is conducting an impact analysis, which we’ll talk about in more detail later. But also, things like creating user personas, developing a risk log, and developing mitigation strategies as part of that risk log.

And these activities really ensure that all potential impacts are well understood because we can’t support people, we can’t help them transition, we can’t do any of that until we unless we know that the impacts are understood and how to address them.

Engage

Engage is exactly what it sounds like. It’s engaging with stakeholders to prepare them for the change and support them through the transition. It involves identifying the intervention techniques you want to use that are good fit with the type of change and organizational culture we’re working with. But it’s really about maximizing stakeholder engagement and making sure we’re reaching folks, making sure we’re hearing them, making sure we’re supporting them and understanding how to support them.

Activities in this phase are focused on executing those intervention techniques such as communication plans, listening sessions, training strategies, testing support.

The focus is really about working directly with the stakeholders, to make sure they’re informed, prepared, and supportive of the change, and if they’re not supportive of the change, we’ve at least worked with them to bring them along, so they understand why we’re doing it.

Iterate

And then iterate. We always want to improve the change process. That’s why I believe the change plan is a living working document.  You want to pivot based on feedback and results. Make sure what we’re putting effort into, what we’re doing, is working. Reflect on what we achieve. Celebrate those milestones, celebrate those wins. Celebrate progress we’ve made. Determine what was less effective. Leave that behind and monitor progress.

Some activities are doing your metrics reporting, post go-live surveys, anything that can help us maintain momentum and measure progress towards that objective.

Change Plan Journey

Understanding Emotional Responses

The change plan journey, as I mentioned, is really about the emotional part of it. Maybe folks have talked about a user journey through a process or a user’s journey as they interact with the system. I do believe that the term journey is used widely, but I think it’s important that we consider the perspective of the folks that we’re asking to undertake this change.

This is based on some of Kübler-Ross’s work and research. Here is kind of the emotional side of moving through a change.

Different people move through the curve at different paces. Some people don’t even start at the start of the curve they start halfway through. But most people do follow a similar curve when they’re asked to make a change. And it’s not linear. But this does help us understand and adjust our approach.

Here’s a sample one provided today. You know, we start with the kind of negative emotions of denial and anger. Which is why people may seem disengaged or frustrated during the change. It’s often just a normal part of the process and recognizing where you or your team are on this curve can help us respond constructively.

I like to say it’s important to meet organizations, teams, and people where they are. Using this tool to assess where people are within the change helps us know where we need to try to meet them.

If they’re in the initial stages of that change journey, they have those negative emotions, and it could be for any number of reasons. If change was not communicated effectively, they might feel blindsided, which is where you’ll get that anger, feeling, or stakeholders may downplay the change or think it doesn’t affect them, which can slow progress.

What you want to meet them with is clarity.

Communicate early, and often. Explain the why, and address questions head on when you get that anger, when they realize the change is real and have frustration. Maybe they’re blaming leadership. Maybe they’re blaming any number of things. You want to meet them with compassion, and what that can look like is just acknowledging frustrations, creating a safe space for feedback, having a listening session, letting them have a voice.

In all of this, cynicism really comes in when the reality of the change sinks in, and it may cause feelings of sadness or loss, or they may react in more of a negotiation way to minimize the change. You know, a lot of times we struggle with folks wanting to hold on to the way things are done today and getting them to kind of sort of break up with that and look forward.

We can say, okay, I understand. That’s how we’re doing it today. But when you’re doing it today, what are you trying to achieve? That’s what we’re working towards. Let’s talk about a new way to get there. Or, let’s talk about the best way to get there in this new world that we’re implementing.

So those emotional states are best met with enthusiasm, reassurance, clarifying goals and timelines, and reinforcing benefits.

And then hopefully, we get to exploration, which is really about folks testing where they fit into the change. And that’s when we want to introduce things like training and coaching. Celebrate those wins, foster that culture of learning so that they have competence, and they’ll feel good.

They’ll feel like they are going to be prepared when this actually happens, and we migrate onto the system.

And then, if we’ve done all of these things, if we’ve moved them along the curve, we’ll get to acceptance. That’s where they’re going to embrace change and be ready to move forward.

Going back to what I said at the beginning of the webinar, it’s not about being happy. They still might tell you that. I was going to use an example of a system, but that could get me into trouble. I’ll use “Debbie’s system of accounting” is the worst decision this organization ever made, but they’ve accepted it. They’re trained on it. They know how to use it, and they’re going to be comfortable on day one.

And that’s that knowledge piece of it.

Timeline

Moving on to the timeline. So obviously, this is a sample timeline, I’m just putting up one that I’ve used in a previous project. And what I wanted to just highlight is what’s important when I’m building my timeline and my change plan.

Obviously sequencing of activities is important. The timeline really acts as a vehicle to provide a clear sequence of the key change management activities. It ensures that each phase of the change process builds upon the previous one, helps stakeholders understand the progression of actions, helps them see what’s coming, and helps them understand the timelines.

But again, it’s really important that the timeline aligns with the implementation project timeline. The synchronization ensures that the change activities are happening in tandem. We want to make sure we’re in lockstep for the overall project rollout.

We really don’t like if they get out of sequence or out of line. We don’t want that, because we want to reduce any disruption. We want to maximize the impact of each step, and we want to time it well.

Each change plan may require adjustments based on, you know, an organization, specific context, size, complexity. Obviously, these change activities may or may not happen on every project. But it’s really about making sure that that framework exists, and it can be tailored to fit the needs of the project. And while it aligns with the implementation timeline. It needs to have its own separate space, because all of the activities need to be monitored as well.

The Benefit of Using a Change Plan

One: it’s that cohesive framework. The framework ensures changes are handled consistently at all levels by mapping out the specific activities, responsibilities and deadlines.

And it’s a way of organizing it. It’s a way of making it make sense. Why are we doing this particular change management activity? It’s part of this framework.

And its objective is, it helps us think through the right tools. We can’t just throw training and communication at every project and think we’ve handled change management. It’s not enough. You need to figure out what other change management tools from your toolkit can ensure that the change process is tailored to the specific needs of this project and your stakeholders.

It helps align project leadership on the change management strategy which really helps in maintaining coherence and support throughout the organization.

It’s very important to plan ahead, because you never want to seem like you’re running behind on the change management activities.

Communicating About Training

I cannot tell you how many questions I get when I’ve been a part of implementation, many implementations and part of the kickoff or part of the planning is people are already asking about training.

It’s because they don’t trust that they’re going to be trained. They want to know when they’re going to be trained. They want to know that you’ve thought about it. You’ve planned for it. You have all the details about it. You’re not going to forget about it.

And so, if you map these things out and you have them in the messaging and you have the transparency, and you can share it, you’re going to help build trust, because they know you’re planning ahead, and they know you’re dedicating time and effort towards it.

And as all the research says, that I keep saying over and over again, it really is going to increase the likelihood of project success.

Proactively managing that human side of the change increases the likelihood of the project success by ensuring that everyone is prepared and feels like they are supported in the transition of that change.

Case Study: No Change Plan

And so, let’s talk about some times a change plan wasn’t used.

This was an organization we worked with. They really wanted a comprehensive tool to help manage their relationships. They had some complex needs around compliance and customer service contracting, and they tried for a really long time to stretch their ERP to also serve as their CRM. But it didn’t work in the end. And they really wanted a holistic view of the folks that they had relationships with. As an organization they wanted to transition from kind of a compliance focused relationships to more of a partnership working collaborative relationship. They needed to spend more time on that part of it and less on the compliance part of it.

The project leadership did a great job putting together a project team. It was very representative; all the right foundation Legos were being put down on that first ground floor.

But then, as the project got busy, they it was a project manager who was also trying to do the change management thing, and there was never an official change plan. There was never an official change management track. This client tried to put change management Legos into the project construct.

And what happened were training issues. The training was too basic. It didn’t cover the needs of the organization. They didn’t really understand what was changing from a process standpoint. And because everything was so decentralized, staff couldn’t see how they were going to be working together, because we never really talked about that, and it didn’t get there.

There was a last-minute rush at the end to go live. There wasn’t a cut over plan which is typically part of your change plan. And everybody scrambled, so it wasn’t a smooth transition. We lost a lot of folks in the training issues missing that big picture. They were unsure about how to do things. Training didn’t land. They didn’t feel confident moving to this new system like they were ready to go. And they lost engagement.

And so, to Kyle’s point earlier of what I say ad nauseum, they brought us in after to help them bring everybody along.

The first thing we did was that change plan, and we really gave those folks a voice into that change plan because we felt that they had gone so long without being heard. The change management was started in the beginning by that project manager, and they had lost a lot of trust along the way. So, we really wanted them to have a voice in it to see us listening to them and building it and so we got there in the end. But they ended up paying for it in the end, and the timeline was twice as long.

Kyle Haines: Debbie. There was a question in the Q&A, which, bravo to whoever put it there and not using the chat function, they followed directions.

They’re also a statewide organization, and they were wondering this: being a statewide organization that typically has people from different parts from urban and rural areas – did that create any unique change aspects for this organization?

Debbie Cameron: It did. Because you want to recognize where all these different stakeholders, external, internal wherever they are – you’re going to have that problem internally in some organizations, and I’ve seen that where even headquarters versus a small office, there’s some different levels of forward thinking. There are different levels of history, where some offices may feel like a redheaded stepchild for lack of a better term. And so, you really are going to run into this at any organization.

However, when you take an organization and it’s decentralized and the locations are so different, and the culture of each office is so different, you’re really going to run into it more.

And that’s when that change journey is really important, because when you have that broad of a stakeholder group with those different perspectives, you want to use that change journey to really figure out where everyone is. Because you’re going to need to manage those stakeholders differently.

Kyle Haines: It feels like we could do an entire webinar series about decentralized, federated organizations and the unique change impacts of those types of organizations because my experience is that those have a whole different layer of change associated with them, and a whole different type of change.

Debbie Cameron: I agree wholeheartedly.

Kyle Haines: I’ll put myself back on mute. This is your webinar. I shouldn’t be adding my perspective.

Debbie Cameron: Your perspective is always welcome.

Case Study: Successful Use of a Change Plan

So of course, we have to follow that up with a story of success. Right?

We got to sell the use of our change plan when we worked with a religious organization. This was about creating a unified website and decommissioning a lot of smaller sites, and at first, like a lot of folks, they weren’t excited to increase the investment of the project and add change management to it and so they were kind of little hesitant, but said, okay, well, we’ll do a little change plan. Let’s do a little investment, and we’ll see where it goes.

But as the project went on, and as the change plan came into effect, and the activities started happening on a smaller scale, it was immediately evident about the difference this was making, and the things that were maybe going to be ignored that the change plan was bringing out, and had giving a voice to, and all the things that maybe hadn’t been thought through.

And it was great because the change management effort grew, the change plan grew, and in the end, it was a successful project, and folks felt heard. We received a lot of feedback and leadership received a lot of feedback on how they felt supported and listened to. The things that we couldn’t get to were acknowledged and put somewhere, and they knew it was going to happen after. We did start the larger change management a little later on into the project, so we couldn’t do all the things, but it was still a great success.

Not only did we achieve the successful migration, but we had great stakeholder engagement, and the training and support materials were well received. We got great feedback on those. And there wasn’t even a part in the project that was going to be dedicated to process and roles, and we were able to do that, and that headed off a lot of trouble that we would have had post go-live had we not gotten there.

Preparation and Communication in Process Change

Next question for our participants. Have you ever experienced a process change at work and felt like it was introduced without sufficient preparation or communication?

I’ll just speak for myself. I have been part of a process change at work that was not communicated well to me. And you know it didn’t make me happy, and I didn’t respond. Well, I even actually, in my personal life, my husband cut our cable without really doing some change management with me around it, and I had some negative emotions, and I wanted to have a bigger voice than that. It all comes down to the fact that there was no change management around it. There was no acknowledgement that this was coming. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t hear about it the way I wanted to hear about it. I wasn’t asked my opinion.

Another statistic on the screen about just how effective change management is. So, for Debbie Cameron, what was going to change for me when I no longer had my cable DVR, and I’m now on YouTube TV?

For your nonprofit, what is going to happen if we’re switching? You know, we’re taking away Zoom and we’re moving strictly to Teams. How am I going to know the specifics of the change when I’m moving from Dropbox to SharePoint?

And that’s what the impact analysis is going to do for you.

Impact Analysis

What the impact analysis is: it’s a tool that provides a detailed understanding of how the change will impact your stakeholders, what workflows it affects, what technologies.

In the workload is there an organizational structure change here. It’s really figuring out where the change is and talking about it in a specific way and figuring out, how can we support people in that particular change.

We use it because it’s really critical for an organization to understand how a change will affect people, processes, systems and roles before the change is implemented, by identifying who and what is impacted and to what extent

leaders can make informed decisions and allocate resources. Your training is going to be detailed, and targeted communications support strategies will help folks minimize those disruptions at go-live.

Impacts: Now and Future Process

There’s the process side. That’s all the way on the left-hand side of the worksheet, and this really should be used during the system planning and design documenting processes affected by the project. It lays a great foundation to build on during system design. An internal resource can populate the spreadsheet. You can have several internal resources for their particular departments populate what they see being impacted by the change. Maybe each member of your project team does it.

If you if you’ve done a software selection, that’s the perfect time to be doing this, because, as you’re going through requirement, definition, and demos, and all of that, you can be populating this in advance of the implementation.

It’s really important to note relevant details about the current state. And then, if anything’s known about the future state, note that there. But that might come later.

Impacts: Description and Rating

Then we have the middle part of the spreadsheet, and it’s really about the impact and the description. Now you notice there’s a number of columns here in the example. Depending on your project, there might only be one column. It might just be the impact description, or maybe there’s two. This example is just for a large complex project.

This is what your impact analysis would likely look at. This is what you want to be completing once you’re in system design and systems designs are about done. You want to wait until a lot of the decisions have been made. Although, I will say this tool is really great about pointing out decisions that are outstanding, and where we’ve missed decisions that still need to be made, and identifying areas of incomplete design.

So sometimes it’s best to leverage a change team member here, or maybe it’s a rotating responsibility of the project team. But you note the impact and then you assign it a rating.

What’s important about the rating is for large changes, there’s a lot of change. And you’re not going to be able to address every single one of them. Right? This rating helps you surface the high impact changes, and maybe even the medium impact changes. You really want those high rating changes to be what you’re informing your colleagues about in communications project updates, all staff meetings, department meetings, listening sessions. And that’s really going to inform your training and support.

The columns show how we’re categorizing the change in this really complex project. Is it a process or policy change? Is it an organizational structure change? Is it a culture behavior change? Is it a role or responsibility change? Is it just a change in the technology or tool? Is it a workload change?

These are all the things that we would be able to communicate and have folks understand and prepare them for.

Impacts: Intervention Techniques

And then there’s the intervention techniques. How do we want to address this particular, based on the change level? What’s changing? How do we want to address it?

Then you can use this to sort and inform. So, for instance, all the ones that are checked with training, you can redact those from this document, and it goes into whatever tool you’re using to build your curriculum for your training communications. It can feed your communications plan about messaging. Are you preparing for a project update? Let’s take our 10 top highest changes and highlight those so that folks begin to hear it, because the more they hear it, the more they’re going to be used to hearing it, and the less it’s going to seem jarring as you get close to go-live.

Why Use an Impact Analysis?

Our outcomes of using an impact analysis are really the shared understanding to find what is changing in each area of the organization. It helps us understand the impact on employees. And it allows for planning so that we can ensure that they have the requisite knowledge skills and ability.

It obviously feeds smoother transitions. We want minimal disruptions. We want people to feel minimal disruptions. And this will help that because we’re really going to be able to articulate is your role changing? Are your responsibilities changing?

You can develop targeted intervention strategies because you have the data to do so. Better resource allocation and planning, because you’re going to have a better idea of where the biggest changes are happening and where you should put your focus. And I think this is probably the most important. I’ve seen it happen. And it’s such a cool thing to see.

I’m curious if anyone has used an impact analysis. I’d appreciate in the chat just to see if you agree that this is so impactful. It provides increased confidence in the process from your stakeholders, because they understand that you’re investing in it. And you care. And you’re really getting into the details of what’s changing. And that’s a really cool thing to see.

Kyle Haines: A comment in the Q&A. She said, not a question, she said this is extremely useful. They’re implementing CRM and grants management systems for their organization, and she was just appreciative for all of this good content.

Debbie Cameron: That’s awesome. That’s awesome.

Case Study: Not Using Impact Analysis

So obviously there is a negative impact if we’re not using our impact analysis. This was a client who selected and implemented a CRM. Change management was a huge buzzword for a particular member of leadership who wanted to do lots of change management. This person brought up change management all the time but really wanted to pick and choose the change management that was leveraged, and impact analysis seemed like a waste of time. So, despite strong recommendations from yours truly that the impact analysis should be done, and it was an oversight to drop it, this was just something that wasn’t seen as worth the time and investment.

So, what happened without working through the team’s processes and mapping how the new system would impact them? It really left the team unsure of how they were supposed to use the system. And as a result, training and even design – you saw the problems as we were reaching the milestones in design. We were seeing that folks – it wasn’t landing for them. They couldn’t vision how this was going to become a part of their life, and the training was really ineffective, and it wasn’t for lack of effort. We did a great job with what we had from design, and we did a couple of working sessions to try to tease out some training content. We tried to piece together the impact analysis without doing an impact analysis. But we didn’t have enough detail. The proper analysis wasn’t done, and at the end of the day training was good, not great.

We launched the system, and adoption was super low, and leadership was like what the heck, we invested in change management! We did all these things!

And the answer was, they still didn’t know how to integrate it into their work, because the change management was done at a surface level. And sometimes that’s all you can do and like I said, it was good, but not great.

But again, to Kyle’s point, which I guess is telling with how many times I’ve said this to him. If you don’t pay for it during the implementation, you’ll pay for it after, because then they had to post launch go through and work with each team to really map their process to what it was today.

And what did we lose doing it after we lost their trust? Everybody thought the system didn’t work. So much negativity and so much disruption, and so many things that we could have avoided if we had just done this impact analysis. I will say, if we’re going to invest any time and energy into change management, obviously, training and communication can be left by the wayside. But impact analysis should really, really be a priority.

Case Study: Using Impact Analysis

This was an organization that hadn’t flexed their change management muscle a lot. And you know, when you’re trying to be a change management advisor to an organization or lead change in an organization that hasn’t flexed it a lot, there is a lot of push pull, because a lot of a lot of things in change management don’t always land for folks.

A saying that a colleague recently shared with me by the name of Kyle Haynes is, “why did you hire us to bark if you’re going to do the barking?”

I get it. Change is hard and changing to layer change management into your work is hard. It’s a change. We’re asking you to do a change while you’re doing a change.

This client came to us, and they had an open heart and mind, and they said, we want to become change champions. We’ll do whatever you tell us. They leaned into everything we put forward. They were embarking on a custom build of a Salesforce solution to support their programmatic work. It was a really large project, and it impacted thousands of volunteers and hundreds of chapters.

They had this great idea to create these three different stakeholder journeys of who the project impacted, so we did an impact analysis for each journey.

We leveraged a lot of other change management tools throughout this project, however, when asked at the end of the change management what they valued most, the majority of the surveys that we got back, said the impact analysis was by far the most impactful. It showed in the outcomes. We had focused training. We had a lot of great communications. We had informative listening sessions. It was really great.

Q&A

And with that I know we only have 4 min left, but I’ll turn it back to Kyle for Q&A if there is any.

Kyle Haines: I answered one of the questions about how to scale. Whether the model that you shared with define success, impact analysis, engage, and iterate, whether it can be scaled down to a smaller organization.

Debbie Cameron: It absolutely can. It’s really about figuring out the capacity that you could dedicate to each one of those phases. And what should we prioritize in that phase? Because there’s a list of 5 to 7 things, just do one. Do one. Do the most impactful thing in each one of those four sequential things, and you’ll make a difference. And that’s one of the reasons we designed it the way we did, because it’s about really just choosing what you can take on in that moment that will be the most impactful.

Kyle Haines: So, are you saying in that instance, don’t make perfect the enemy of the good?

Debbie Cameron: I will never use that term. But yes.

Kyle Haines: Any other questions before we close out? I want to give people a couple of seconds to either put something in chat or Q&A. We are going to wrap up shortly. We know that it’s the top of the hour. Everybody get your camera ready. You can be some of the first people to register for our next webinar in this series.

Debbie, I don’t see any additional questions.

Just a couple of quick things. We do have change management resources available blog posts. There are under our resources section, including some of the templates that Debbie referenced. Those are good places to start. Debbie said it – getting started is the most important thing, and, as she said, don’t make perfect the enemy of the good.

The other thing that I just share is that we are a LinkedIn-first company. We oftentimes post there first before we update our blogs. We’re really trying to stay engaged with the community there. So just a nudge to follow Debbie. Follow me, follow Build Consulting on LinkedIn.

And then, lastly, here it is. The next webinar is on May 14th, and this is more about what you’re doing post go-live and adoption. This QR code will take you right now to the registration page. You want a front row seat for this. As you can see, Debbie has a wealth of information.

And, Debbie, I really appreciate you making time for all of the questions today.

And I appreciate everyone joining us.

Debbie Cameron: Thank you. Everyone for being here.

Kyle Haines: Have a great day.