Why It's NEVER Too Late (or Too Early) to Begin Org Change Management on a Digital Transformation

in a perfect world change management activities would start before a digital transformation ever begins however the reality is a lot of organizations don't start change management efforts until they're Midway through a transformation but what exactly should you know and do when you're in that sort of situation that's what I want to talk about here today my name is Eric Kimberling I'm the CEO of third stage Consulting we're an independent consulting firm that helps clients throughout the world reach their third stage of digital transformation success and one of the core service offerings and capabilities we provide to our clients is organizational change management and we often find that organizations don't recognize or focus on the need for change management until they're well down the path of being mid-stream and a digital transformation while this is far from ideal it's something that is the reality of a lot of organizations and a lot of change managers are in a situation where they're trying to play catch-up and they're trying to make up for lost time of not having focused on change management sooner in fact I recently just got a message on social media from a change management practitioner who was disappointed that throughout her career she had found that she was never brought in early in a project to help do change management right from the start but instead she was brought in later in projects to help clean up messes after change management issues had already percolated and become big problems and so for that reason she had become somewhat burned out and dissatisfied with the world of change management however this Dynamic is more common than you might think most organizations don't realize early on how important change management is it's a small subset of organizations and teams that recognize the need for change management early and oftentimes organizations have to feel the pain and feel the resistance to change and feel the challenges and the operational issues as they go through a digital transformation before they recognize the need for organizational change management so what I want to do today is talk about what you can do if you're in this position if you're in a situation where you're already Downstream you've already gotten a chunk of the way through your digital transformation and now you're just now starting change management what is it you can do and there's good news and bad news as it relates to this and what I want to do is provide a roadmap to help you move forward now to learn more about change best practices and deliverables and processes you can follow for your digital transformation I encourage you to read our guide to organizational change management it's a free guide I've included links in the description field below or you can scan the QR code in front of you to read that deep dive into what change management is and how you can deploy change management in your organization foreign news as it relates to situations of change management starting Midstream let's start with the good news the good news is that your organization for whatever reason finally recognizes the change management is important it may be too late in your mind it's certainly not ideal it doesn't fit that ideal future state of what change of management should look like but the good news is you still have time to make an impact and to help people through the transformation and that's really what change management is about it's about helping people ensure that they feel more comfortable with changes and ultimately helps reduce chaos and stress within an organization and ultimately increases and optimizes business value that organizations are going to get out of their digital transformation so that's the good news is that the organization recognizes the need for change management and chances are now that they've felt the pain of not having change management and not having started change management sooner it's highly likely that they're more bought into the concept of change management than they might be otherwise so while there is a dark side there's some catch-up to do there's some bad news associated with which I'll get to here in a moment the good news is that oftentimes you you're going to be in a position where the organization recognizes the need for change management is more bought in than they might be otherwise [Music] now the bad news in all this is that you're behind the eight ball you're already behind schedule if you're starting change management Midstream halfway or however long through a digital transformation you might be that's the bad news the other part of the bad news is that change management is typically on the critical path for an effective digital transformation in other words it's change management that's going to take the longest typically of all the different work streams in a digital transformation the technology work stream is typically going to move a lot faster than the ability for an organization that is people to change which puts further pressure on you as a change manager or as a change management team because now not only are you behind schedule but you were already going to be starting too late and you are already going to be on the critical path even if you would have started on time so that's the bad news we've got to deal with here is that while the organization probably is more bought into the concept of change management now that they've felt the pain of not having started change management the bad news is you have less time there's even more pressure to be effective in your change efforts now to help navigate this bad news and the reality of the situation you're in I'm going to see if gear is here in a moment and talk about what it is you can do to catch up and to be effective and to prioritize your time to ensure that you can have immediate in long lasting value on your organization [Music] so the question becomes how do we get caught up what is it we can do a lot of times when you're first deployed in a change initiative in the middle of a transformation you look around and things are moving at a million miles an hour and there's a lot of chaos there's a lot of confusion there's a lot of change management issues and it can be overwhelming even as a change expert so the key here is what do we do how do we get some grounding and some direction and some focus on what it is we can do and how can we prioritize our time so that we're not trying to boil the ocean we're not trying to change the world overnight but we are having immediate and long lasting impact on the organization well first and foremost and probably most importantly you want to do an organizational Readiness assessment and really do a quantitative and qualitative assessment of what is the state of the organization how ready is the organization for change where are the biggest pockets of resistance going to come from what are the root causes of those pockets of resistance you also want to understand the cultural nuances of the organization what are the strengths and weaknesses of the culture and how can we overcome some of those weaknesses and what are the things that are going to have the biggest positive and negative impact potentially on the digital transformation as it relates to people now this organizational Readiness assessment is typically done through two prongs one is a Anonymous quantitative employee survey and the other is qualitative focus groups small focus groups of people within different departments or different locations of your organization and by going through a structured process of analyzing where you are today it gives you a laundry list of problems right you're going to have a sense of where all the challenges are going to be and it's going to be more than you can do in the amount of time you have because you're already behind schedule there's a lot to do there's a lot of competing priorities and resources and so it allows you to really look at the laundry list of things that can and should be done it allows you to start to prioritize what it is that can be done and to have the most immediate impact but unless we do that organizational Readiness assessment it's just a lot of noise it's a lot of subjective noise a lot of emotion and a lot of things that are hard to act on but if we do something structured and methodical and unemotional in terms of an organizational Readiness assessment it gives us some direction and Clarity on where we can and should focus our time so the key in all this is to determine how do we focus on the highest value areas so that we're not trying to do too much in too little time and we're not trying to boil the ocean I'll give you a few examples of some things that are typically high value immediate relief source of change activities one is a change impact assessment understanding how people's jobs are going to be affected between the current state and the future state if we understand that we articulate it and we can communicate that that's going to help us overcome a lot of resistance and it's going to help us work through a lot of the resistance to change that every organization has on a semi-related note there's also Clarity of people's roles and responsibilities and clarifying what jobs are going to look like in the future if all we do is provide Clarity for better for worse on what someone's job is going to look like in the future that is going to calm things down and it's going to help people ease into the transition more than a lot of other change activities and then third a third example of a high value immediate impact sort of activity is going to be the stakeholder and executive alignment so if you can get an assessment of how much on the same page your Executives and key stakeholders are or aren't it's going to allow you to work through those areas of misalignments so that you can all get on the same page with at the very least what direction you're going as an organization with this digital transformation so those are just three examples of possibilities of what might be high value immediate priorities for you as you conduct an organizational assessment but the key to this though is to do that assessment up front and then determine what can we do with the resources in time and budget that we do have left foreign so to help you further dive into this concept of what to do when you're Midstream and how to address change management I want to share with you two resources one is a playlist on organizational change management on my YouTube channel you can find that right here there's a link to it takes you to every video I've ever done over the last five years or so related to organizational change management I encourage you to binge watch as many of those videos as you can you'll learn a lot about change management and get some ideas and how you can deploy some of those Concepts within your organization secondly I encourage you to download our guide to organizational change management it's a book that I wrote a couple years ago that dives into some of the best practices and lessons learned that we as a team have from helping so many organizations through their change initiatives you can read that book by scanning the QR code in front of you or you can use the links in the description field below so I hope you found this information useful hope you have a great day which is very unfortunate but unfortunate see how many times I can say unfortunately in the same sentence however this Dynamic is more is that wind it's unfortunate that it's unfortunate in terms of a organizational Readiness it has oh

Channel: Digital Transformation with Eric Kimberling

Views: 700

Keywords: OCM, Change Management, Digital Transformation, Organizational Readiness Assessment, Current State, Future State

Id: fydTr3oaJYM

Length: 10min 3sec (603 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 10 2023