Organization Change Management (OCM) is a discipline that provides a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state while minimizing resistance and maximizing adoption.

OCM is a critical, and sometimes overlooked, aspect for the success of business solutions delivery engagements. As discussed on several occasions in this book, business solutions encompass multiple processes and workflows of an organization, and any changes to these systems can affect the daily operations of many individuals and their behavior. In smaller organizations, where the CEO or President is often the driving force behind a project of this magnitude, companies get away with pretty much brute force or pressure from the top to "adopt or else". But the larger the organization, and the larger the scope and impact of the project, the more critical it is for project teams to consider OCM as an integral part of the delivery activities. This will ensure obstacles to adoption are removed in a timely manner, and employee buy-in is an integral part of the solution deployment approach.

In their article titled The Business Impact of Change Management, the authors have brought together multiple research studies to understand the impact and importance of OCM on projects. They explain that the purpose of OCM "is to mitigate the risks of a project, including costs, scheduling, and performance," which OCM achieves by "facilitating greater economic value faster by effectively developing, deploying, and aligning the company's assets for a given project."

The article references a McKinsey study that examined many project variables and in particular, the effect of an OCM program on a project's ROI. The results were striking! Projects that included good OCM programs resulted in a 143% Return on Investment (ROI), meaning that companies gained 43 cents for every dollar they spent on the project. On the other hand, projects with no or poor OCM programs included produced a 35% ROI, meaning that companies lost 65 cents for every dollar they spent.

Another study entitled Six Barriers to CRM Project Success was highlighted by the authors, citing the reasons for failure of CRM projects:

The authors also describe a study by ProSci, a recognized leader in change management research. To efficiently and effectively manage the changes that a project produces in an organization, the organization needs the following:

As a process, the goal of OCM is to empower the employees to accept and embrace changes in their current business environment. Jeff Hiatt is the author of the Employee's Survival Guide to Change, and he talks about how it is easy and fascinating to talk about change happening to someone else, but how worrisome and uncomfortable an individual becomes when a change happens in their environment. Hiatt describes the field of change management as "the convergence of two fields of thought…an engineer's approach to improving business performance and a psychologist's approach to managing the human side of change."

In the book titled Integrating People with Process and Technology, Jon Anton and others look into how the organization's acquisition of technology does not necessarily translate into usage by its people. The following is a telling observation from the authors. "The truth about technology implementations is that although technology does what the vendor promised, ROI issues arise when change management is not figured in as part of the overall technology project budget. In cases where technology implementations include change management, the implementation becomes an exhilarating experience that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the company." For a successful solution deployment, the authors' recommendation is that the company should "integrate their people, process and technology... in such a way that changes are embraced and viewed as good." They define a "good" change as one where the technology "makes it easier for employees to do their job and to be more efficient, makes it more operationally effective for employees serving their customers, and allows the company's products and services to be easily accessible."

These discussions underscore the importance of managing the people side of the change management equation for the success of the project. At the end of the day, it is the system users who ultimately define the success or failure of the solution. Without user buy-in, it doesn't matter how good the solution is if the users don't see the need to use it. As such, it is very important that users are closely involved during the implementation, and any concerns are heard and considered. It is also not uncommon for companies to conduct change workshops to convey the importance of being open-minded about the upcoming change.

One of the more popular books on the subject of people and change is Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. Written as a parable featuring two mice and two little people, the story provides an amusing view of how one of the characters is able to navigate the maze and find the cheese, while the other struggles due to his reluctance to change. The story can be related to a corporate setting in which the "maze" is the organization that the employee works in, while the "cheese" is the end goal that the organization is trying to achieve. The enlightening story has helped many employees deal with the inevitable change, and has also been used as a guide for change workshops.

So far, we have discussed the general concepts of OCM. In the next section, we look at how Sure Step enables and supports the notion of organizational change during the course of the implementations.

Organizational Change Management in Sure Step

Organizational Change Management (OCM) is described in Sure Step as an integrated communications, training, sponsorship, and organization alignment approach to assist employees in transitioning effectively into a new way of accomplishing work. The Sure Step approach depicts the strategies for success in four critical Organization Change Management areas—a review of the previous section shows that these strategies are very well aligned to the approaches of the change management research analysts.

• Executive and Stakeholder Engagement: This strategy requires business sponsor ownership and accountability for the envisioned solution by calling on the organization's business unit leaders to create an environment where process changes resulting from ERP/CRM solutions are accepted and owned. The strategy includes open communication, setting appropriate expectations, assisting in resolving critical project issues in a timely manner, and providing appropriate levels of reinforcement to ensure project success.
• Organization Alignment and Mobilization: For this strategy to succeed, the delivery team needs to analyze the workforce impact and transition to the future processes with the current business practices as the baseline. The appropriate business stakeholders will need to be actively engaged to understand the solution capabilities and to assess the solution effectiveness for their respective areas.
• Communications: This key success area focuses on communicating solution design, implementation timing and progress, involvement required by the stakeholders, and acceptance of new methods of work. Communications include getting the right information delivered at the right time in a suitable format and through an appropriate means, as well as feedback and response strategies via periodic surveys and iterative lessons-learned discussions.
• Training: This strategy focuses on ensuring that end users are comfortable with the new business processes, have the required skill set to work within the designed processes, and have been well trained on the use of the application. The strategy encompasses initial and ongoing user training for successful adoption of the new processes and tools.

Sure Step guidance for OCM is aligned along five pillars, as shown in the following diagram:

Each of these pillars is described in the following sections. The guidance provided within the OCM discipline is broken down into activities, as shown in the following screenshot:

It also bears mention that these activities are in turn integrated with the Sure Step project types, meaning that they are called out as prescribed steps within the corresponding project workflow.

Define OCM Strategy

The OCM Strategy defines the overall vision, objectives, and activities for the various change management components of the project or program, to ensure successful adoption of the solution. The sub-components of OCM strategy include:

• Organization Risk and Readiness Assessment: Assesses the readiness of the organization to undertake a project of this magnitude, understand the risks that may exist, and define the mitigating strategies to overcome the barriers to project success.
• Organization Change Management strategy: Defines the nature and sequence of specific change management activities, resources, and interdependencies required to facilitate the change process.
• Communications strategy: Defines the content, method, and timing of the messaging and communications to align management, stakeholders, and business units.
• Training strategy: Defines the training audience and the approach that will be used to assimilate the new processes and solution to the user groups.
• Data taxonomy: Defines the data entities that will be required, as well as any optional data elements.
• Master Data management strategy: Defines the overall strategy and processes to manage and maintain Master Data once the solution is in production.

As mentioned earlier, the activities in the OCM Discipline section of Sure Step are also called out in the Sure Step project types, especially the Enterprise project type. For example, "Conduct Organization Risk and Readiness Assessment" is an activity under the Program Management cross phase of the Enterprise project type. The project activities also include excellent tools and templates, such as the Organization Risk Readiness Analysis Tool, a screenshot of which is shown next:

Align and mobilize leadership

With the strategy components defined, the overall change management action plan is created for the business executives and sponsors in this sub-discipline.

• Leadership action plan: Drives the change strategy by defining the communications from all levels, including executives and middle managers, to the stakeholders, those most impacted by the new solution. The plan should include regular checkpoints to audit the performance, and necessary course corrections should be made as needed.
• Leadership communications: Ensures that the project business executives and sponsors communicate periodically with the stakeholders over the course of the project.

For the Leadership Communication activity, Sure Step includes a ready-to-use Outlook e-mail template that can be shaped to suit the organization's messaging style. A screenshot of the template is shown next:

Engage stakeholders

The purpose of this OCM sub-discipline is to ensure that the project stakeholders are identified and are proactively engaged throughout the project lifecycle.

• Stakeholder communications: Encompasses crafting appropriate communications to stakeholders from leadership and the project teams, obtaining feedback, and creating action plans where necessary to address any issues that are raised.
• Solution storyboard presentation: Involves presenting the solution storyboard to the stakeholders prior to design completion in order to obtain proactive feedback and buy-in on the solution.
• Solution prototype demo: Involves demonstrating the configured solution to the stakeholders during solution development in order to obtain proactive feedback on the usability of the solution.

Similar to the previous sub-disciplines, these activities are aligned to the Sure Step project type activities, with templates included for communications, to create storyboards, and so on.

Align organization

The key goal of this OCM sub-discipline is to ensure that the stakeholders are adequately prepared to adopt the new solution. This is achieved by implementing the solution as envisioned for the future processes, defining roles and responsibilities, and preparing and executing training for the organization.

• Future state business process models: Future-state business processes based on the new solution are developed, which in turn provide the baseline to train and align the stakeholders to adopt the new solution.
• Job impact analysis: A key step to ensure that stakeholders have the information necessary to understand the impact of the project initiative on their job performance, job description, and career path.
• Roles and responsibilities: Builds on the job impact analysis to define the new or modified roles and responsibilities resulting from the new solution.
• Train-the-trainer training: Ensures that the organization's trainers are adept with the new solution and prepared to train the end users.
• Master Data management process: Ensures that the Master Data management processes are implemented by the data owners and that appropriate ownership and accountability for the data is established.

As referenced in previous chapters, Sure Step affords a vast library of Process Models that can be leveraged to develop the future state business process flows. Other templates such as a Job Impact Analysis spreadsheet are also included within the associated project type activities.

Enable organization

This sub-discipline ensures that the new solution is deployed, users are trained, and appropriate support processes are made operational.

• End user training: Ensures that adequate and ongoing training to the end users on the new solution is provided to facilitate user adoption.
• Transition solution to support: The appropriate support organization is engaged, and the solution handed over to the team that will provide ongoing support.
• Master Data management process handover: Ensures that the data management processes are handed over to the data owners so that the data integrity and accuracy can be maintained in the new solution.

The management of data is sometimes confusing to the user as to why that belongs under organizational change management. In ERP/CRM solution deployments, there is an old adage often used by consultants, "Garbage in, garbage out." As harsh as that sounds, as good as the new solution may be, if the data provided is still bad, it will only result in the solution users getting bad information faster. Managing the data elements is therefore an important change component that can impact the stakeholders.

In the above sections, we introduced the concepts of OCM, and also covered OCM from a Sure Step perspective. As we learned, OCM is a critical discipline that should not be overlooked during solution delivery. Given the investment that companies make in the solution, including OCM experts to guide the organization to successfully adopt the new solution should be a given.