Digital transformation causes disruption because it holistically changes an organization. It changes the way people work, a company’s essence, and how it operates. Consequently, it sometimes even changes the culture. Change management ’s role is to help along the entire journey. More business leaders realize that change management needs to be incorporated in everything a company does. Furthermore, it’s best to do so from the beginning of a technology implementation. You can’t start change management work too soon, but you can start it too late.

In all, projects that employ effective change management strategies are six times more likely to be successful than those that do not, according to

Prosci . 3 Actions to Take Now:

1. Prepare Your Employees

Prepare and equip your employees for a successful transition into a new way of operating. As a result, you will have a significant advantage over competitors that do not. Up to 75 percent of a client’s project ROI depends on employees actually using the system or process they implement as intended. Ultimately, employees define project success. It’s not whether or not the new system has defects.

2. Explain the Benefits

If digital transformation is to succeed, your employees have to buy into and then adopt the change, whether it’s a new system or process. Buy-in doesn’t happen because the project team sent a company-wide email that a new process is coming. Employees have to choose to buy in on their own. They have to see the benefits – to the company and to them. Once they do, you can start down the path of culture change, tactical change, or process change. All of this to make digital transformation a reality.

3. Emphasize the Experience

If you don’t think strategically about your people, they become “doers.” They’re along for the ride. Give employees an experience that’s not only going to make your organization better but also present new challenges and growth opportunities.

How Change Management Dramatically Reduced Migration Incidents

Our client Oshkosh Corporation needed to transition more than 10,000 global employees, across five business segments, from IBM Lotus Notes email and Sametime messaging systems to an on premises MicrosoftExchange and Skype for Business solution.

OshKosh’s help desk anticipated a 20- to 30-percent incident rate, but our organizational change management (OCM) efforts reduced that to less than 5 percent. Working with the client, our OCM consultants led the development and execution of a readiness strategy. This strategy enabled a smooth transition for the users while establishing a standard for excellence in change management.

We developed a robust OCM strategy that enabled a strong global change champion network to help execute the strategy. This strategy included global communications, key stakeholder engagement, and end-user training plans. We developed a training curriculum that incorporated a variety of methods including instructor-led super user training; customized, multilingual end-user eLearning modules, and quick reference guides.

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