Beam me up Scotty! We need Change Management for our digital transformation project

We live in exciting times where our social and work communications are looking more and more like an episode of Star Trek. We carry powerful tablet devices that are able to analyse complex information from billions of people, and we wear devices that help us communicate across the globe whilst tracking and alerting us on our health.

The pace of change is increasing; the stats show that Instagram hit 2 billion users this year, much faster than it took Facebook for that same milestone, only 6 years ago. So, with this in mind, most companies assume that their employees will simply adopt and embrace technology in the workplace in the same way. However, there is a fundamental difference between choosing to use a social media app to communicate with your friends and family to be being told that you must use a specific tool or entirely new Software as a Service (SaaS) to do your job. 

Switching it on is not enough

Many companies, large and small, are failing in delivering such a digital transformation program, and this is rarely due to their ability to deliver the technical change but rather because they have not considered the ‘people side of change’. There is often an assumption that if the digital service were simply available, people would use it.

We see from the studies of human behaviour that our natural response to change is resistance, however compelling the vision of the new ways of working may be. We should never underestimate the comfort of the current state. 

I see many business cases that have been developed based on infrastructure cost savings.  Whilst these can still be delivered, they create a mindset and governance that is biased towards delivering a technical change. However, when it comes to digital transformation, the focus must be on the business value derived from people working in more productive ways. 

Prosci, with its world-leading best practice research, calls this the Unified Value proposition.  We need both the technical side and people side moving the organisation from the current state, how things are done today, through to the future state, how we are designing the new solution together to bring success, the fullest value possible for the desired and expected outcomes.

To help identify the value enabled in a digital transformation project, you should be clear on what success looks like, how it’s defined, how you will measure it and how you will know it’s been delivered. There are too many stories of great IT development projects that are never or rarely used by the business.  If people don’t change how they do their job, then we ultimately won’t achieve what we set out to do from the beginning.

In defining success, explore the movement of your key change measures, i.e. time saved, ROI, etc, as your users adopt a specific digital ‘business scenario’/’ways of working’, for example: all 

• Collaborative working
• Effective meetings
• Faster Decision Making
• Content creation,
• Innovation etc

So switching it on is not enough! 

A call to Action

• Define success, be clear about how you will measure it and track it throughout the delivery.
• Build your business case based on the business value derived from people working in new ways and not just technical cost savings.  
• Establish a project structure, resourcing, and governance model to manage this as people change the project, i.e. enable business discussions on delivering value through people to be given equal if not higher priority to the technical delivery.

Author: Alan Kendall