Most Important Change Management Deliverables in a Digital Transformation

change management is the most important critical success factor for any successful digital transformation what exactly are those deliverables that you should focus on as you're creating your organizational change management plan that's what I want to talk about here today my name is Eric Kimberling I'm the CEO of third stage Consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps class throughout the world to reach their third stage of digital transformation success when we're helping our client base throughout the world with their digital Transformations we find that change management is the key success factor for an effective digital

transformation reason for this is that the people side or the human side of change is the most important or the most difficult part of digital transformation but too many organizations and project teams don't fully understand what change management means how it can add value and what the deliverables are that will help ensure that your change program is delivering value so what I want to do today is talk about the seven deliverables that I think are most important to a successful change program within the digital transformation and for more best practices around change management in the

meantime I also encourage you to download our guide to change management it's a white paper that I wrote that outlines the best practices and lessons from having managed hundreds of change programs throughout the world so I encourage you to download that white paper to get a better understanding to augment some of the things we're going to talk about here today as it relates to change management deliverables I've included links to that white paper as well as others in the description field below [Music] the first key deliverable to focus on in a change management program is

a change Readiness assessment and the change Readiness assessment is really your way of getting a lay of the land and understanding what the strengths and weaknesses are from an organizational perspective of the current situation the current environment that you're in so this change Readiness assessment will look at the culture of the organization it'll look at the way leadership is viewed within the organization it'll look at the communication style of the organization as well as a plethora of other change variables that are important to understand in order to define a change strategy that's going to best

fit your situation now there's typically two parallel paths to completing an organizational Readiness assessment one is a quantitative survey that's Anonymous that you send to employees that's meant to capture information at a high volume of what the culture and the organization looks like and this is a way of understanding what some of the potential strengths and weaknesses of the organization are understanding those cultural strengths that we know we want to preserve as well as understanding the weaknesses that we know we need to address as part of our change program the second thing that we run

in parallel in doing this change Readiness assessment is also looking at qualitative focus groups so this is where we have more of a discussion with different subsets of people throughout the organization to get qualitative information to augment the quantitative information we got through the anonymous employee surveys so typically we will roll this out as part of an early stage of a change management program and we ultimately will analyze the data analyze the results to understand what it is we need to do in terms of defining a change strategy and plan that's more prescriptive and specific

to what it is we're trying to accomplish as an organization next is your overall change management plan that's another key deliverable for an effective change management strategy and the reason I didn't mention the change management plan first is because you need that input from your change Readiness assessment to be able to understand what exactly it is that you need to do from a strategic and planning perspective on the change management program so for example if you find that there's a lack of communication and a lack of collaboration between different departments or business units within your

organization that ends up becoming a fundamental strategy of how you're going to affect change within the organization so that's why we don't create the change plan first we create the change management plan after we've done the organizational assessment so we've created something that's not just a shotgun approach that tries a bunch of change management tactics to see what sticks instead we're really being prescriptive and specific about change management tactics that we know will work based on what it is we're trying to accomplish in the current state of the organization and ultimately this change management plan

should become part of the overall program plan too so you'll typically have a techno medical work stream or a technical implementer that's managing the software implementation now we need to figure out how to integrate this change plan into the overall program and it's quite likely that the change management strategy and plan might influence or should influence the overall program plan in the overall program duration simply because changing people and changing behavior and changing an organization is a lot more difficult and takes a lot more time than deploying new technology so assuming that you're not deploying

Technologies just to deploy technology and you want to get people to actually use the technology and get real business value out of it you need to make sure that that change management plan incorporates and integrates well into the overall program plan one of the most fundamental change management deliverables during the design stage of an implementation is going to be to articulate the impacts that the new technologies and the new processes are going to have on the organization so when we're doing our design workshops for new technologies typically what we do from a change perspective is

also look at the future State and what it is we're trying to accomplish and what those new processes will look like and then we assess by different work groups in different departments and different business units what the impact to that part of the organization is going to be and this is very important for a couple of different reasons one is it allows us to be very specific in how we deploy change strategies and change tactics we can do it in a way that addresses the specific change impacts that are going to affect the organization secondly

by understanding the change impact in where we're starting from today and where we're going in the future it allows us to better understand the impact of the organization so for some organizations they experience a more incremental change because the processes aren't as material but for some organizations the impacts to parts of the organization are huge they're massive changes and massive overhauls of the way that people are doing their jobs so we need to understand that magnitude of change the nature of the change how people's jobs are going to change because ultimately those inputs become key

to defining other deliverables later Downstream that I'll talk about including your training plan your Communications plan even your process Improvement plan those are just a few examples of other Downstream deliverables within a digital transformation that are dependent on the change impact assessment when we deploy new technologies and new business processes it's impossible to do so without having an impact to people's jobs in other words new technology and new processes are going to change the way people do their jobs and it's also going to change the roles and responsibilities of people and the way they've always

done their jobs so for example if we know we're deploying new technology partly because we're going to automate business processes get rid of some of the spreadsheets and manual re-keying of data and manual searching for information we know that stuff's going to go away but now we need to figure out what does that mean to the organization going forward how are we going to design people's jobs in this future state of Automation and eliminating some of those redundant manual tasks it's not enough to say that we're just going to get rid of those manual tasks

we need to figure out how we're going to replace people's jobs and the work they do day to day with new roles and responsibilities and so that organizational design is really important I can't emphasize it enough because when organizations don't Define their future State organizational design that creates a perceived lack of understanding of what the impact is to the organization and it's true because if you don't do the organizational design activity and work stream and deliverable you're not going to understand what the impact of the organization is and how people's jobs are going to change

so it's really important that we Define what the new organization is going to look like especially if we're doing some material reorganization efforts as part of our transformation so for example let's just say we're moving and consolidating our different HR departments into one Consolidated HR departments or we're consolidating multiple accounting groups into one shared service accounting groups across the entire organization those are pretty big changes very big changes to an organization and we have to have a clear vision of what that future state is so that we can be more effective in our change management

efforts at the end of the day organizations are made up of individual human beings and a digital transformation's ability to succeed is dependent on those humans and those individuals supporting the project and enabling the project and some people within an organization have more power and influence than others either because they're Executives or leaders within an organization or because they have a high degree of tenure they've been around a long time or because they're highly respected within the organization so there's different reasons why certain people within an organization have more power and influence over an organization

and so therefore it's important that we understand who these stakeholders are and make sure we understand where they stand in the whole transformation are they supporters of the project are they resisting the project are they against it are they somewhere in the middle they're sort of neutral and we've got to have a plan of how we deal with this person by person so let's just say you have a mid-level manager that manages the entire function that's going to deliver the most business value of the entire transformation it's a situation where this transformation is dependent on

this person's group or department now if this person is resisting change doesn't like the idea of putting in new technologies it's safe to assume that you're not going to realize that business value because his or her organization is going to resist that change and they're not going to be on board with it because he or she the leader is not on board with it either so we need to understand who these stakeholders are so that if they're Advocates we can leverage them and use them to help spread the advocacy if they're against the project we

can start to neutralize or blunt the impact the negative impacts of their resistance and if they're neutral we have a pretty good chance of converting them to Advocates if we do our jobs right so stakeholder assessment and having a stakeholder management plan is one of the key deliverables and most important activities Within effective change management strategy in organization's understanding of what the future State's going to be what's expected of them how their jobs are going to change and what their contributions to the Future State organization are going to be is largely dependent on the communications

they receive from executive leadership so having a deliberate Communications plan is very critical to ensure that we are communicating clear messages to the organization throughout the transformation now there's a couple different layers of communication there's the top layer which I'd call the more strategic or the more project-based layer of communications which is more keeping people in the loop and keeping people aware of what's happening with the transformation why we're going through the transformation what the timing is what to expect with training and testing and all that good stuff but then the more important layer that

most organizations Overlook is the more detailed Communications layer and the more targeted Communications this is where the change impact assessment the stakeholder assessment that I talked about earlier as two examples are such important inputs to ensure that we are targeting the right Communications to the right people at the right time so people don't want to just know the status of the project which is that high level Communications I talked about it's important but that's just barely scratching the surface what people really want to understand is what's in it for me how does this change affect

me and what does my future look like in this post digital transformation world that I'm going to be working in so we need to have a very clear Communications plan that's targeted to what people want to know how it affects them individual or as a work group or as a department and make sure that we are getting the communication out as early as possible so that we're not waiting until training right before go live for people to hear some of these messages for the first time and unfortunately that's too often what happens in digital Transformations

is people start to freak out during the training courses because they hadn't heard about these massive changes to their jobs until now that they're in training so a way to mitigate that and to accelerate the freak out process to use a technical term is to make sure that we have that Communications plan early and often so that we give people two-way Communications and an opportunity to understand and React to what the changes are going to be for them individually and as a work group now last but not least one of the key change management deliverables

for an effective change strategy is going to be your training plan and this is where you identify what exactly we're going to train people on and in how we're going to train them who's going to conduct the training and we also track who's actually been through the training so let me start off with the content of a training plan and what it is that you're going to be training on it's important to note that you're not training people just on how to use a new system and unfortunately that's how a lot of change practitioners think

about change management and training is that they're going to train people to use a new system employees don't care about using technology they care about doing their job technology is one part of it but what they really need to understand is what their business process looks like what their responsibilities are and how the technology will help them do that and so there's a business process component that's really important to augment the training of technology and understanding how transactions work within the system those are two very different things but you need to cover both of those

things within a training program and by the way ideally you would have communicated some of these issues and some of these topics to people before they got to training so that by the time they get to training they already understand what the major changes of their job are what's expected of them now they just need to be shown what these new processes look like and how they're going to look in the new technology so it's more of a reinforcement rather than a First Time Communication of some of the major changes happening in the organization the

other thing in effective training plan should do is make sure that you've got the right people in the right training at the right time you don't want to do a shotgun approach to just training people on all the different functions and processes within a new system but instead you want to focus on what it is they need to know and yes they probably need to know some upstream and downstream activities as well but you want to understand and design the courses in a way that's very specific to their jobs and what it is they need

to know you also want to make sure you do the training at the right time you want to make sure you're not training them too early in the process to where they forget by the time you go live on new technology and then finally your training plan should also have a way of tracking who is completed training and what the overall user adoption is you want to measure your training efforts so you can actually measure competency so that you know prior to go live whether or not your people are ready and fully understand how these

new systems and processes work so the training plan is sort of a Capstone deliverable that comes toward the end of a project but it's very important to make sure you get it right because it's sort of your last line of defense before go live to make sure that people understand and are comfortable with the changes the new processes and the new technologies so these are the seven most important deliverables from a change management perspective as you're going through your digital transformation for more information about other change management strategies and tactics and other deliverables that we

haven't talked about here in today's video I encourage you to download our guide to change management it's a free guide that you can download via the links below it outlines some change management best practices and Lessons Learned based on my 25 years of helping organizations through their change management initiatives so I encourage you to download that white paper as well as other ebooks and resources and videos that have included links to below so I hope you found this information useful and hope you have a great day um let me just start the whole thing yeah

I feel like I'm jumbling the communications plan is very critical to ensure that we are um communicating talking