Change is difficult, and the reluctance to change, often on the part of end-user employees, has been at the heart of countless failures of new technology deployments within businesses. Such failures lead to technical debt, lost opportunity, wasted money and sometimes organizational collapse.
It’s critical that businesses get past their employees’ reluctance to change, said John Rozsa and Jordan Houston, both innovation and strategy consultants with CDW, in a recent ServiceNow webinar. Rozsa and Houston discussed ways that businesses can more effectively manage change with respect to deployments of ServiceNow technology.
They suggested the most effective way to do so is through a formalized process called organizational change management (OCM). “Organizational change management bridges the gap between your current and future state,” Houston said. “How does that work? It starts with adoption, making sure your users understand why you’re making this change. To equip them for success, it’s necessary to give those users the knowledge and skills to leverage ServiceNow more effectively.”
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ServiceNow offers a broad platform of solutions that span IT service management, customer service and many other employee workflows, enabling organizations to automate, optimize and streamline various business processes. As a result, its success within an organization hinges critically on the degree to which employees embrace it, Houston explained.
That’s often a hurdle: “Sometimes, people think existing processes work fine, even if in fact they’re outdated, generate technical debt or fail to allow organizations to take advantage of emerging opportunities,” he explained. In such cases, it’s up to leaders to stress the benefits of the change and help end users get more comfortable with the new technology.
An Effective Way to Manage Change
CDW’s approach to change management is adaptable based on an organization’s needs. In general, however, to help businesses manage change as they deploy new technologies such as ServiceNow, CDW employs the Prosci framework of change management, which emphasizes “awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement,” or ADKAR, which describes the phases of successful change adoption:
- Awareness. Effective change management begins with employees understanding why they’re being asked to make a change at all. The awareness phase is when leaders make that clear, while also explaining how the change will benefit employees themselves, Houston said.
- Desire. The most successful deployments of new IT tools involve end users who are genuinely excited about the upgrade. When organizations resort to forcing change upon reluctant staff, adoptions are less successful and less widespread. “It boils down to a personal decision by those end users to want to engage and participate,” Houston said. That desire to change is a direct result of leaders’ effectiveness during the awareness phase.
- Knowledge. After users understand why a change is necessary and are eager to make it, success depends on knowing what to do and how to do it. This is where a robust training strategy is critical, he said.
- Ability. The better trained employees are, the more capable they are. The success of the knowledge phase of a change management process is the critical factor in determining how well workers are equipped to thrive with the new technology solution.
- Reinforcement. An effective change management process continues well after a new solution is rolled out and employees are fully trained. New technologies are often accompanied by new policies and processes, and it’s not uncommon to see organizations backslide into old habits sometimes after a deployment. Even when a rollout goes as planned, leaders must think about how to keep the momentum going and make it permanent.
Five Principles of Change Management
Rozsa explained that even before getting to the ADKAR approach, businesses should bear in mind that the Prosci change management philosophy emphasizes five core principles:
- Project sponsorship. It’s vitally important that every technology implementation have an engaged executive sponsor who champions the project, Rozsa said. This person should be identified early in the project, and it is best when they are in a senior leadership position, enabling them to both demonstrate management’s commitment to the rollout and hold people accountable to key benchmarks.
- Stakeholder engagement. Key stakeholders in a deployment must be identified from its earliest stages, Rozsa said, and a plan should be developed for ensuring they are engaged throughout the process.
- Communications strategy. Organizations often have a general sense that they’ll simply communicate changes via email or other corporate communication channels, at appropriate points. But that’s not enough. They must develop an intentional strategy for what, when, how and to whom they’ll communicate. The plan must be clear, yet flexible enough to adapt as the project evolves, Rozsa said.
- Training and enablement. OCM is about more than just “sending out communications”; it’s really about the people and the process. “We need to be sure that we have a training plan in place, and that it’s ongoing training and enablement,” Rozsa said. “It’s not one and done.”
- Change champion network. The most successful deployments involve companies that identify networks of “change champions.” These are often frontline employees or mid-level managers who have embraced the new solution enthusiastically, will advocate for it with their peers and can offer to help people get more comfortable using it.
A good OCM process supports a ServiceNow implementation by ensuring the project objectives, strategies and scope are clearly identified early, and by ensuring that they key principles are being met, Rozsa said. It also ensures that organizations are measuring adoption levels and capturing lessons learned.
Some organizations take OCM too lightly, thinking it’s nothing more than a matter of sending out a few emails to alert the team of a change. Others are intimated by it, thinking OCM requires massive action, and wind up doing nothing. The truth is in the middle, Rozsa said: “OCM obviously is critical, but organizations shouldn’t be overwhelmed. Instead, stay organized, keep things simple and follow the process.”
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