How to Facilitate Change: Part 2

Last week, I started the topic of how to facilitate change by listing first the importance of listening. You can still read it here in case you missed it.

This week, I’m going to go into some of the more tactical aspects of facilitating company change, whether that be in the form of implementing new ways of working or adopting new technology.

But… this is a newsletter, so I will try to also keep it as concise as possible.

In the case of implementing new technology (but the same applies to implementing a new process), the key things you’ll want to factor in when thinking about how to successfully navigate that change (besides looping in and listening to your stakeholders) will revolve around:

• how you set objectives;

• determining user roles;

• defining a clear, tactical kick-off strategy;

• determining who will be impacted by the change, how they will interact with the new technology and what training and documentation will be need.

Now let’s take a slightly closer look at those fundamental deliverables:

Setting Objectives 

The key with setting objectives is to make them as actionable and specific as possible. If you have a big primary objective, you can split it into several actionable milestones. This approach ensures people feel that they are making progress and having an impact in the short-to-medium term as they build their way up to reaching the bigger objective.

Here are some questions you can answer in order to come up with clear, effective objectives:

• What’s the desired outcome or value of the process/ technology?

• How will you measure success? How frequently will you report on it?

• Will people be rewarded for their engagement? How?

Defining User types and Training Needs 

More often than not, when implementing a new technology, people in different roles will be impacted differently. Some will need to engage with the new tool more than others. Same goes for processes.

Training should therefore be broken down and address the needs of your different stakeholder segments. If we’re talking about a new tool, you will typically have user roles such as viewers/ analysts, editors, admins and super admins or super users.

Distinguishing between them is important because the level of training required will differ. Super users will often require a lot more hands-on training and live discussions with their trainers while viewers (and in some cases editors), will only need some form of written documentation and/ or training videos or webinars.

Creating a Kick-off Strategy

The manner in which a new process or technology is launched effectively sets the foundation for how successfully it will be adopted long-term:

If you launch to a lot of people with issues, gaps or poor training, that can have quite a negative impact that will be difficult to recover from.

Remember: small problems become big problems at scale.

It’s often a good idea to pilot a new technology before implementing a full roll-out. This will enable you to get direct feedback and identify issues or gaps that need to be addressed before you actually put it into the hands of your entire user base.

It’s therefore very important to:

• Decide which segment of your users is best placed to engage in the pilot;

• What training needs they will have;

• Set expectations around the objective of the pilot and what feedback you will need to gather;

• Analyze performance both from a user experience as well as a technology perspective;

• Decide how you will roll-out more broadly based on the results of the pilot

That’s it for this week and this topic! What did you think? Do you enjoy content like this that is a little bit more operationally-focused? Let me know in the poll below!

P.S. This week’s newsletter came quite late, I know. It’s been a hectic couple of weeks and it was difficult to find the time and focus to put it together. But here it is!