Solution Spotlight CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND BPMS

Transcription

1 Solution Spotlight CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND BPMS

2 T his solution spotlight examines the role that change management plays in business management (BPM). In this exclusive Q&A with Forrester Research s Connie Moore, learn how to incorporate change management into BPM initiatives, as well as how to avoid the biggest mistakes and pitfalls when doing so. Plus, gain real-world examples of companies that have successfully implemented change management programs. PAGE 2 OF 16

3 MANAGING CHANGE IN PROCESS IMPROVEMENT: WHY AND HOW TO DO THE JOB WELL Peter Schooff, Contributing Editor, ebizq Editor s Note: In this two-part interview, ebizq s Peter Schooff speaks with Forrester Research s Connie Moore about the key role that change management plays in business improvement. Here, in Part I, Moore offers insights and advice on how to minimize the impact of change in BPM projects. In Part II, she informally discusses change management case hi. Moore, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst, is among the speakers at Forrester s upcoming Embracing Digital Disruption Forum for BPM and business-architecture professionals. This Q & A, excerpted from a longer podcast, has been edited for length, clarity and editorial style. PAGE 3 OF 16

4 CHANGE IS PROBABLY THE HARDEST THING A COMPANY CAN ENGAGE IN. HOW DOES CHANGE MANAGEMENT HELP THIS PROCESS? Moore: management can be, and should be, done for any major initiatives that an organization is doing because, at some level, they involve individuals being willing to do something different. It could be merger or acquisition. It could be a change in business strategy. It could be the deployment of new technology. And in the case we re talking about today, it could be doing business es a very different way than you have in the past, and so it changes to how people work. Now, whatever change is being introduced into an organization--even a positive change from executive s point of view, always has some level of resistance that creates a performance dip. It impacts productivity; it impacts the performance of the organization. What change management can do is minimize that performance dip, make it more shallow, and it can reduce the amount of time that this performance dip occurs. So we re talking about something that sometimes executives think is too touchy-feely, but we re [also] talking about something that can absolutely impact business outcomes and make them more positive. That s why it s so important to do change management whenever something disruptive is happening PAGE 4 OF 16

5 to the workforce. IN TERMS OF BPM, WOULD YOU SAY THAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT IS A SEPARATE ISSUE, OR SHOULD IT BE PART OF THE BPM INITIATIVE RIGHT AWAY? Moore: I think both. management is a discipline. There are people who are certified in it. There are practitioners who are experts at change management and they can support any type of initiative. So in that way, it s separate from BPM. But in other ways, it is very much part and parcel of BPM because BPM projects always introduce change. You re changing your es, sometimes from very siloed functional ways of doing work to very cross-functional ways of doing work. That means, often, middle management is extremely resistant because they perceive a loss of power, they perceive a loss of control or it could actually be a loss of power and a loss of control. So in BPM, it s very important to put change management into BPM initiatives. Here s how: You should focus on BPM right up front as you re looking at any other aspect of the project. You should designate change agents within the business. As you move through your BPM project and you put in BPM centers of excellence or specific centers of excellence for es, you want a change PAGE 5 OF 16

6 management practitioner in that center of excellence. You want to bake it into the BPM initiative from start to finish. WHAT ARE SOME OF BIGGEST OBSTACLES TO CHANGE IN AN ORGANIZATION AND EXACTLY HOW DOES CHANGE MANAGEMENT HELP WITH THOSE? Moore: I think that obstacles can radiate out from the individual outward. So whenever you make a change, the individual is personally concerned. And also, different groups within the organization--going from teams to the entire organization--have concerns as well. You want to address those concerns at all the different levels. If you just talk at the organizational level and you don t get down to the individual level, you will still have resistance and, actually, incorrect information or incorrect perceptions if you don t get down to the individual level. An individual would be resisting the change [with concerns such as:] How does it impact my job? What do I do now? What s my compensation going to be? How is it going to change? Isit going to change? What s my career path? How s my status affected? Then it goes out to the team: How does it affect my team? How does it impact what we do, how we work together, our status within the organization? PAGE 6 OF 16

7 And then overall: How does it impact the organization? How does it impact our bonuses? How is it going to impact our performance in the marketplace, our performance on Wall Street? So you can see that a lot of these concerns are related to an individual s sense of what they do, their status of what they do, their career path of what they do, and their wallet. [They wonder] how it s going to impact every single person in the organization and the organization at large. Those are the biggest obstacles. If you don t have a way of communicating directly and succinctly about those, you ll continue to have pockets of resistance and a lack of buy-in to whatever change is being proposed. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE BIGGEST MISTAKES TO AVOID WHEN ENGAGING IN CHANGE MANAGEMENT? Moore: One of the very biggest mistakes is insufficient stakeholder support. Now, sometimes these changes come from the top and they flow downwards, so you don t have to have to worry about stakeholder support in those instances. But let s be specific about BPM. Sometimes these initiatives are being done without the CEO s knowledge or support, without the COO s knowledge or tacit support. In those cases, you have to have that support. You have to get those PAGE 7 OF 16

8 stakeholders on board [so they know] what you re doing, why you re doing it, what value it delivers to the organization. If you don t have that buy-in, you re going to have problems with the project and you re going to have problems with change. Another big obstacle or mistake is losing momentum. What we see over and over again is organizations that frontload the change management in the project. They start out with all-hands meetings, town-hall meetings, all kind of webinars, podcasts, blog posts, etc., and they lose momentum after two, three, five, six months. But the project is still going on for the next two years and the change management peters out and that s when it s needed most. I just cannot overstate how important it is to keep the communication going much longer than you really think it s bvneeded--because it will be needed longer than you can imagine. Another one is if the initiative you re undertaking has too much scope, and you re trying to do too many things, then it s going to be hard to get those changes to stick because it doesn t have enough focus, it doesn t have enough energy behind [ just] a few things. When I talk to organizations that have done change management and are in the thick of the fray, they go back to communication. One of the general PAGE 8 OF 16

9 managers of a large energy company was speaking at our conference last year on change management and his takeaway was: Communicate. Communicate. Communicate. You can t communicate too much. I also have a quote from a financial services firm [executive, who said:] Don t underestimate the power of communication. Even if you don t have the answer, communicate, communicate, keep talking, keep talking, keep talking. It may take saying something 100 times before people get it, especially for -transformation projects. So start early and do it often. I could go on. I could give you quote after quote after quote from BPM practitioners who talk about communication. I ll punctuate it by saying one business executive would get on a plane and fly across the United States to be in a meeting to talk about his BPM project for 15 to 30 minutes because communication was so important. PAGE 9 OF 16

10 CHANGE MANAGEMENT FOR BPM: TWO REAL-LIFE STORIES Peter Schooff, Contributing Editor, ebizq Editor s Note: In this two-part interview, ebizq s Peter Schooff speaks with Forrester Research s Connie Moore about the key role that change management plays in business improvement. In Part I, Moore offers insights and advice on how to minimize the impact of change in BPM projects. Here, in Part II, she discusses examples of change management in action. Moore, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst, is among the speakers at Forrester s upcoming Embracing Digital Disruption Forum for BPM and business-architecture professionals. This Q & A, excerpted from a longer podcast, has been edited for length, clarity and editorial style. PAGE 10 OF 16

11 CAN YOU GIVE US SOME EXAMPLES OF COMPANIES THAT HAVE SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED CHANGE MANAGEMENT PROGRAMS? Moore: Yes. One of my favorites is Constellation Brands. We featured them as a case study in one of our reports on change management. You may not be familiar with Constellation Brands as a company name, but you definitely would be familiar with their products because they are the world s largest premium wine company, [with brands including] Mondavi, Ravenswood, Estancia--you could on and on. They went through a period where they had many acquisitions. They followed this by a shift in strategy where they sold off some of the lower-cost, lower-market brands. So they went from 10,000 employees to 4,000 employees. Well, you can imagine what kind of change issues that business strategy created, what kind of anxiety it created within the organization. So they put a high premium on change management. In addition, they launched the Fusion Project, which was a consolidation of their [Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)] solutions from five different solutions to one platform, standardizing and centralizing their es for sourcing and procuring. They implemented an end-to-end supply chain management system and they created a new global IT infrastructure to support the PAGE 11 OF 16

12 system changes and changes. At the same time, they deployed a master data management [(MDM)] master data management solution on an enterprise-wide basis. They evolved 300 employees and, at any given time, between 20 and 100 external consultants in the Fusion Project alone. Their HR executive headed up this initiative. That s fascinating to me because I believe that change management is a competency that HR organizations need to have...furthermore, I believe that business practitioners need to reach out and team with HR practitioners on change management. And I know of organizations where they ve done that to tremendous effect. So this project at Constellation was led by the HR executive, who put a heavy premium, a heavy focus on communications. So at the beginning of the project they set up an intranet site. They created team profiles. They had project updates. The CEO would report on the status of all their initiatives. They talked about what business benefits were being delivered and they kept it up to date. They had newsletters and targeted s [sent] throughout the company to the management team and to mid-level managers and to employees about what they were achieving and what the next steps were and what people could expect. PAGE 12 OF 16

13 They had 65 change agents that they identified. These were from all levels of the organization, not just executives and managers. These were people who were perceived to be leaders in the organization and peers that had high credibility. These change agents would participate in monthly meetings. They would have informal feedback sessions. They would distribute monthly surveys. They would have one-on-one conversations with people in their spheres of influence. These change agents really were the feet on the ground that made the changes stick, made the changes happen. In addition, they created a center of excellence for sustaining the change. They had dedicated resources that focused on training, that focused on change management initiatives within this and on governance for how they were going to get people involved in project governance. [They also adopted an approach of looking at everything in terms of start, stop or continue. ] They stepped back and said, Hmm, should we start this? Should we stop this? Should we continue to do whatever it is that people are working on? That gave them a really good vehicle for making changes at the individual worker level. PAGE 13 OF 16

14 EBIZQ: HOW ABOUT ANOTHER EXAMPLE? Moore: Sloan Valve is a manufacturer. They have done an incredible job of using all the change management tools that are available and applying them to their large-scale BPM projects. The started out with reengineering the corporation, the concept that [the late consultant and author] Michael Hammer laid down. When that ran out of scope and no longer helped their project, they looked at the discipline, the body of knowledge created by John Kotter, who is a [Harvard Business School emeritus] professor and a very respected change management practitioner. Leading change using the steps that Kotter outlined kind of helped their project, but they needed to get deeper, more hands-on, more tactile. So they turned to ADKAR, which is the methodology from Prosci [Research, a provider of change management training and tools]. Prosci is the one that actually certifies practitioners in this ADKAR methodology [Editor s Note: ADKAR is a change management model; the letters stand for awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement. ] Finally, when ADKAR ran out of gas and wasn t able to add much more to their project but they still needed help, they turned to FranklinCovey s Four Disciplines [of Execution, best practices for turning strategy into action]. That s what they re working on right now. PAGE 14 OF 16

15 What Four Disciplines has done is allow them to focus on execution. And the concept is that strategy isn t the problem. Lack of ideas isn t a problem. The problem is the ability to execute in a predictable way that s measurable on a few critical goals that have been linked to the organization s overall success. The Four Disciplines from FranklinCovey are: Focusing on the wildly important, narrowing your goals to one or two. Acting on your lead measures. Keeping a compelling scorecard. [In other words,] keep metrics. Measure how you re doing against your goals. Creating a cadence of accountability so that all employees are accountable for results and accountable to each other. I really like that. I think that that gets down to brass tacks. All these methodologies that I laid out take change management from some very high-level, almost platitude-level, thing down to very actionable steps that you can do to measure your business outcomes. So that would be my recommendation: Learn from what Constellation Brands has done and what Sloan Valve has done. It s very, very concrete, and it s really made a difference. PAGE 15 OF 16

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