Change management starts when you define the why behind the transformation, and you do that together. You get the folks who are in the trenches doing the work, or if it’s your customers, you get them involved, to get those perspectives so you can understand what is important to them and then keep them engaged throughout the process. You need to identify and create this ‘focus group’ up front, making sure it has diverse perspectives. There’s probably going to be one individual that is your best adopter because they want the change. They are going to be your easiest adopter. And then you might want to have one of your hardest adopters as well, because that gives you a view of what the apprehensions are and why they have them.
As you’re building and designing solutions, understanding and driving change management adoption needs to start on day zero, not on day nine or ten, because a lot of times, that’s where things fall apart. It’s having good ownership — and that’s not just ownership of the technology team; it’s the ownership of the teams and the leaders who are going to be impacted across the organization.
Folks can get enamored by the technology. They’ve been waiting for a long time, and they’re hungry for it, so you move forward. But then you are not thinking about change management and the fact that you’re looking to disrupt and change things that people have been doing in a certain way for years.
What are some of the other potential blind spots that can undermine your success?
You might have the right objective, the right initiative, the right teams coming together, everybody’s rallying, you’ve got the right change happening, and the adoption’s there — and yet, you might not be able to realize the value of this transformation.
Value realization is such an important aspect of transformations, so it’s important that you define together upfront what success looks like. What key performance indicators are we going to look to say that we are at X, we need to get to Y, and we were able to get there. And what does that timeframe look like? What does that journey look like?
