In an interview with McKinsey senior partner Harry Robinson, he explained that 70 percent of digital transformations fail, and that organizations need a proven strategy to beat the odds.
Not surprisingly, common causes for these failures don’t fall under the technical aspects of the project implementations, but rather the people, process, politics, and change management aspects of the project. When developing a strategy to make digital transformation successful, the following questions should be considered:
- Does the executive team build conviction around the change?
- Do you have buy-in from the organization, enough buy in to want to invest extra energy to making the change a success?
- Do you have the right change management infrastructure in place to support communication, training, and impact to the end users when the project is complete?
- Does management support the change?
- Are employees resistant to change?
Prosci defines change management as the discipline that guides how organizations prepare, equip, and support individuals to successfully adopt change to drive organizational success and outcomes. A common misconception when it comes to implementing new software, processes or solutions is that people will eventually adopt them and come to love them if forced to. This fails to consider the lengths those resistant to change will go to in order to circumvent changes they don't like and the lost productivity and negative sentiment this can result in.
We see the positive impact of organizational change management across a wide range of client engagements. Recently, we worked closely with a client team to transform a business area from annual book publishing and data sharing to a digital solution to allow customers to access tools, content, and data through a cloud web app. We leveraged Microsoft Azure B2C to enable customer self-service identity management to reduce support costs. The solution includes an e-commerce microsite that enabled the client to sell directly to customers they were not able to reach before, and with a new subscription model that increased their revenue.
Change management was integral to the success of this project, including:
- Communication: Working with various third parties, including partners and larger clients, ensuring awareness of the coming change and how it would impact their processes.
- Knowledge Transfer: Proper knowledge transfer, both to the technical teams to provide long-term support, and the business teams to understand how updates can be done reducing downtime.
The only constant in this world is change and change management plays a critical role in successful adoption, acceptance and transformation. Concurrency can help you understand what this means for your project and how to successfully design and implement an effective change management strategy.