Information Management: Strategies for Gaining a Competitive Advantage with Data (2014)

Chapter 17. Organizational Change Management

The Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff

The disparity between expecting change and managing it—the “change gap”—is growing at an unprecedented pace. This has put many information management (IM) shops into traction as they initiate the projects needed to stay competitive.

At the same time, IM professionals must concern themselves about the organization’s acceptance of these efforts. To be successful, initiatives must transform the enterprise, but it takes more than wishful thinking to bridge the gap.

IM projects are uniquely able to uncover the need for realigning mindsets. Consolidating information in a data warehouse or a master data management (MDM) hub, applying rules to improve data quality, or implementing workflow/sharing mechanisms all require organizational change.

However, the complexities of engaging in behavioral and enterprise transformation are too often underestimated at great peril, because the “soft stuff” is truly hard.

Keywords

organization change management; project management; leadership; stakeholder management; organizational training

I would be remiss in providing a complete formula for information success if I left off the most important factor of all—people. That’s right, moving workloads to the most effective platforms, utilizing the cloud, setting up the business intelligence, and doing it all in agile fashion, is all for naught without taking care of the people issues.

Information management brings organizational change. There is change in the way decisions are made, in the way data is accessed, in processes around data, and ultimately in company direction and performance. Most organizations, even in the Global 2000,¹ will be completely transformed by information management in the next decade. Whether your company will go there quickly and willingly is the only question.

This chapter presents managing organizational change as a practice—Organizational Change Management (OCM). OCM takes care of the important people issues of information management and empowers information managers to gain acceptance of their work products by introducing a set of supporting work products to manage the change.

With permission, parts of this chapter have been pulled from “Soft Issues, Hard Work” by William McKnight, Teradata Magazine.

“Without people, profit numbers mean squat…it’s the by-product of taking care of people.” – Ken Blanchard, at Leadership Conference

The disparity between expecting change and feeling able to manage it—the “Change Gap”—is growing at an unprecedented pace. This has put a lot of shops into traction as they leap into the projects they need to do to stay competitive, yet remain concerned about the ultimate acceptance of those projects by the organization. To be successful, these projects will need to change the organization. Projects that master change are highly correlated to success. However, to be successful in times of change, wishful thinking will not fill the change gap.

There is nowhere like information management (IM) projects to bring out the need for changing attitudes and mindsets. Changing information by consolidating it into a data warehouse or a master data management hub, applying rules to “fix” the data quality, or implementing workflow/sharing mechanisms requires unprecedented organizational change. The complexities of engaging in behavioral and organizational change in these projects are too often underestimated. This happens at peril. It truly is the “soft stuff” that’s hard.

I will now review a set of work products that should be included in the course of information management projects to ensure that the technical work product results are accepted and ultimately achieve their goals.

Organizational Change Management Work Products

Stakeholder Management Determines Who Will be Affected by the Change

Stakeholders to IM projects come from various parts of the organization and beyond. The perceptions of these “interested parties” of the project will ultimately determine your ability to declare your project a success. Of course, we all put the direct users into this category. Intellectually. However, practically, do we treat this diverse crowd as if they hold the power that they do? Stakeholder Analysis helps ensure that we do.

The obvious stakeholders are in positions of leadership directly over and directly affected by the information management project. With these leaders especially, it is important to model the behavior you want them to adopt. If the impending change is not given priority by you, why would they make it a priority? As such, there may be some special measures necessary in the care of these executives, as opposed to other stakeholders. Executive care must be planned, not haphazard.

Stakeholders also come from indirect users of the information, such as external customers, supply chain partners, suppliers, vendors, partners, your users’ management, and the executive management of the company. Though they may not directly “use” or contribute to the new information, these people are affected by the implementation of IM as well. In most cases, the IM implementation is really about these people and the “users” are really using IM to support these stakeholders. Any stakeholder analysis should go to this level.

Stakeholder Management will address a number of key questions:

Who

Who are the Stakeholders? (Name, Role, Contact information, Location, Impact, Influence)

What

What do they know about the project? (Keep in mind, business leaders are prone to rash judgment and it may take work to move a mindset)

What actions may they take to support the project?

What actions may they take to derail the project?

What about this project affects their success in their role?

What actions do we need to take to influence them in the way we would like?

Where

Where are they now? Are they supportive/negative/neutral now? By how much?

Where are the stakeholder locations?

When

When is the right timing critical to communicate with stakeholders?

How

How are they impacted by the change we are producing?

How will the communications be delivered (personally, phone, video conference, meetings, etc.) to stakeholders?

How much influence do they yield over the success of the information management effort?

Why

Why does the stakeholder have to be involved (Role)?

Why is stakeholder’s relationship important?

Internal partner and support organizations are also stakeholders. They will provide support during and after the project and need to be set up for success. Though a joint responsibility, there are certainly responsibilities of the IM team in meeting their requirements and communicating what is needed in order for the project to be a long-term production success.

After listing out all the stakeholder parties, plans should be developed to manage the stakeholders of the project—not as an afterthought, but as a primary focus of the IM project. When you do this, you will find that you do not have the 5 stakeholders you thought you did, but you actually have 100.

To change the process for a New Product Introduction (utilizing Master Data Management) in one company, we listed 231 stakeholders. It’s not just the people whose jobs are directly impacted. It’s everyone who cares about the process changes. The Human Resources Manager needed to know about it to communicate it to prospective hires. Someone on the Legal team needed to know in order to understand if we were changing anything that would change how contracts are written (we were), frontline employees needed to be aware of the increased pace of product change, and Finance needed to approve any process changes that might affect cost.

Owners from the information management team should be assigned to the stakeholder management tasks based on existing relationships, personality and interest compatibility, bandwidth, and organizational and physical proximity.

The process for Stakeholder Management is: List→Understand→Influence.

We nominally refer to the body of stakeholders on “our side” as Change Champions and expect them to carry the changes’ messages throughout the organization.² A Change Champion should have influence and credibility within the organization. The Change Champion should possess knowledge and skills to help the development team secure commitment to change. The Change Champion can build organizational support for change.

There are many ways they can assist information management efforts. These include:

Answering questions about business machinations in the development of the project

Assisting in identifying key stakeholders’ positions and how they may be influenced, by the Change Champions as well as by the information management team

Weaving key messages into their formal and informal communications with their peers

Contributing to Post-Implementation Job Roles (discussed next)

Identifying post-implementation challenges and helping prepare the organization for them

Ensuring testing is in alignment with core process changes

These Change Champions can dramatically increase the odds of a successful project through their influence and guidance.

Post-Implementation Job Roles Specifies How Jobs Will be Changed

If job roles are expected to change, we do not want to leave the official descriptions of the jobs out there in their former state. Doing so would leave an anchor for the affected stakeholders to the old way and it would also confuse any new people to those positions.

In many companies, there are official locations for job roles. These locations may include human resource descriptions and the files of the management of the positions affected. The Post-Implementation Job Roles task also aligns job performance and bonus metrics of the stakeholders to the project goals.

In most cases, this will be a progressive additive to the worker’s roles and job descriptions. New organizational alignment and coordination responsibilities are also part of defining Post-Implementation Job Roles. The bottom line goal is to assure the right people are equipped to execute new processes and function with the new information management components at the right time.

Sales quotas, data entry volume, data entry quality, responsiveness to the new system, time to market, etc. metrics could change as a result of the new system. For a New Product Introduction system, sales quotas were planned to be increased slowly over time (as a result of increased capabilities) and job descriptions for many who worked in the product group were changed to reflect using the new system for bringing in new products.

Job Role Changes

Examine job roles and titles to ensure that they best represent the work activities for each job role

Job roles should have a clear purpose and area of responsibility within the process

Review each process and identify what work activities belong in a job role and where there should be a hand off to another job role

Organizational alignment begins well before project close and the formal development of the new roles. Demonstrating how all the OCM work products work together during the project, the change managers will identify skills lacking in current functions and those who fill them. This is input into the OCM training work product, described next.

Training Development and Delivery Transfers the Knowledge Required

Those changing roles! We build IM projects and hope for change. However, doing so without Stakeholder Analysis and Post-Implementation Job Roles is just having blind hope. Similarly, stakeholders must be trained for their new roles. If you see a pattern here of project team responsibility, you are getting it! Too often, IM project team responsibilities seem to stop with the technical, implementation tasks. Keep in mind, I am not suggesting the project teams need to execute all of the Organizational Change Management tasks, but they do need to make sure they are completed. Ultimately, whether “outsourced” or not, the IM team has major responsibility for these tasks.

Training begins with a comprehensive needs assessment, which includes an assessment of current versus needed skills by the organization. Business process changes become the backdrop for the training. It allows the training to be role-based, helping participants know what needs to be done so they can be effective with the changes.

Training Development and Delivery could involve any number of mediums, modules, and events. Training could be informal, as in desk-side coaching of a single person, or it could be very formal, as in running multiple classes or webinars for hundreds of suppliers who will now use MDM for entering their supplies for the company. Training could involve the build of materials specific to end-use of the IM project. Pick the medium based on the training need and the best learning method for the stakeholder. Regardless, Training Development and Delivery is a very important Change Management task that conveys the specific expectations of the project to the affected stakeholders.

Training is an opportunity to grow the effectiveness and the careers of the participants, which is one of the biggest rewards of doing an IM project.

Answering the following questions can help piece together the content of the training:

1. Business Processes – What are the processes that are changing? What is new about them? What roles in the processes are changing?

2. Roles – What training is required to perform the new roles? What is the most effective training to get them there? How will the alternative training approaches be mapped to the participants?

For the more formal and multiperson at a time types of training, such as classes and webinars, logistics become a major component of the training development. Training registration, environment reservations and setup, reminders and post-training support infrastructure, are some of the items to master.

My personal favorite is a live webinar that is also recorded for posterity and for those who missed the live event. You may want to run the live webinar multiple times to be sure to accommodate everyone. If everyone is worldwide, this may include some late evenings or early mornings for the trainers. It is almost assured that multiple forms of training are going to be required. See Figure 17.1.

FIGURE 17.1 Sample approach to training.

Deployment Preparation Ensures the Organization is Ready to Manage the Implementation

In the days prior to implementation, it is easy to get caught up in final changes from user acceptance testing, end-to-end testing, or whatever testing phase the development is going through at the time. However, anything about to go to production and start involving support teams and changing hands needs conscious attention to that aspect of the project.

Usually, the machines are supported by a production team, which may or may not ask all the right questions of the project team for the turnover. The project team should be prepared with specific documentation related to how it expects production to be handled and how it expects to stay involved with the project post-production. This should be a final step in what has been an ongoing relationship with the production team.

What is the escalation for production failures in the middle of the night? Who will manage hardware and software patching? Who will make the call/expend the budget for additional disk/CPU/memory as the implementation grows? Who approves new users? Who resets passwords? What are the escalation procedures? What are the help desk procedures?

None of these are questions that you want to address at the moment of failure.

Communications Planning Ensures Continual Communication With the Affected Parties

The training may occur in anticipation of a go-live date, which, as we all know, is subject to change. Stakeholders become affected and job roles change on the go-live date. So, communicating the last, official go-live is essential.

Also, generally announcing the project at this time could begin the process of revision and improvement as it brings out new users who didn’t participate in the project because they thought it wouldn’t make it! General announcements also give weight to the importance of the project and provide a morale boost to the development team, who can see the organization is receiving the fruits of their labor.

This organizational awareness should be distributed in preestablished channels such as company newsletters, intranet sites, and general announcements. All of this needs to be set up beforehand or these communications will undoubtedly be late and less effective.

How about putting up a group picture of the team in the corporate lobby congratulating the success with some text talking about the project? Do something novel. Have fun with it.

Organization Change Management is Essential to Project Success

So, now you have identified and influenced stakeholders, officially set up new job roles, prepared for deployment, and delivered training and communications. Readiness to change applies to all the individuals implicated in these discrete components but it also applies to the organization as a whole. It’s about culture. Culture eats strategy for lunch. OCM works the culture issues to the favor of the information management project.

It would be hard to argue against the criticality of any of these OCM work products, yet many do so tacitly by avoiding and ignoring them. Don’t let solutions to these “soft” problems be “soft.” Make them real, tangible, and part of an action-oriented framework. The tasks reviewed here identify and address major risks to IM projects early in the projects and provide an actionable framework for success.

Corporate Implications of a Focus on IM

The focus on Information Management has broader implications as well, which could be reinforced with OCM. They are:

1. The leadership/management team is reacting to its business environment.

2. Leadership/management strategizes approaches that impact its business environment.

3. Leadership/management fund initiatives that will change the internal environment to respond to the external business’ environment.

4. Initiatives encompass projects that are targeted to change the business’ products, services, and behaviors that affect people, processes, organizations, information, technology, policies, practices, procedures, etc.

5. Information management is an enabling component for the long-term “sustainability” and “survival” of organizations in the 21st Century.

6. To disregard the importance of Information Management and classify it as only a “cost without benefit” will severely inhibit future integrations.

a. Technology changes will affect computing storage, speed/power, and communications. These are only means for doing business.

b. Migrations/transitions will be required to update those technologies.

c. Data (which is the means that organizations use for decision making) requires IM ensuring:

i. Definition – Clarity, Uniqueness, Acceptability

ii. Accuracy – Capture, Content, Format

iii. Timeliness – Time-based Capture, Presentation

iv. Relevance – Comprehension and usefulness in business context

7. So, a comprehensive IM approach is required of the leadership team to make enterprise-scope use of data, “big data,” future predictive real-time analytics, database management systems opportunities, virtualization, and mobile delivery of high-quality data and information.

Information Management needs to be a managerial initiative that will be the basis for sustainable winners in the competitive worldwide market. Because IM is a philosophical and political position from an Organizational Change Management perspective, it really is the “ Hard Stuff”! An information management program must have a focus beyond technology and address the people-related risks. Success will come from taking care of Organizational Change Management.

Action Plan

By project, choose the applicable OCM work products – don’t skimp

Assess all ongoing information management projects for their inclusion of OCM tasks

Leave cycles in project estimates for OCM activities

Ensure new information management projects include OCM tasks

For each project

Identify and influence stakeholders

Set up new job roles

Deliver training

Deliver communications

Prepare for deployment

www.mcknightcg.com/bookch17