“We knew we needed everybody to change their way of working and shift their business processes, and our executives had to champion this because they understood it was something worth doing,” he says. “When I look back on the project now, I see this as a pivotal moment, because every time the project timeline was at risk or we had a potential stumbling block, we went back to these business leaders and came up with a solution to overcome the hurdle together. I made it clear that IT isn’t going to run this project if business doesn’t fully buy in to what we’re doing. We agreed that any effort to drive change needs to be a business project, not an IT project, and that we drive it together as partners.”
According to Carritt, he and his team put a massive amount of effort into change management. But, as he discovered, this doesn’t always guarantee positive results. They offered a lot of training and support prior to going live, but attendance was limited. “We thought we’d done a reasonable job communicating that processes are set to change but, on reflection, we weren’t clear about why this was important,” he says. To bridge the knowledge gap once the cutover day arrived, they developed quick guides, produced training manuals, and even held additional sessions during and after the transition that were far better attended. And, again, he went back to business leaders and made sure they pushed their teams to book time to attend training.
In addition to cost and efficiency savings, a positive result from the project was it allows Infrastructure NSW to get more out of their key technology investments. “We already spend a significant amount of money on 365, so we want to squeeze maximum value out of that spend by increasing the organization’s ability to use it intelligently,” he says. “This is a big win for us. It’s about fewer systems used better.”
