Are You Ready for a Revolution?

I’m starting a revolution. I’m all over it, in fact. I’m ready to say things that I’ve been thinking for a long time, and my comments won’t be popular with many in my profession. So, brace yourselves.

I think we should get rid of change management.

I know what you’re thinking—Claudia, we’ve been selling this for years and we only just now have companies setting up change groups within their organizations. Claudia, change is about the people. Claudia, you’re setting us back twenty years!

Here’s why I make this point. Whether you call it Organizational Change Management, OCM, Change Leadership, or Business Change, we have worked so hard to convince our technical, financial, organizational counterparts that it’s of value, that we aren’t all about “soft skills,” that we have a valid place at the implementation table, that we’ve become useless as a capability. We’ve created assessments, analyses, and dashboards that are, let’s face it, Excel spreadsheets. We call what we do all sorts of catchy names like focus groups, councils, and information sessions. They are meetings, folks. We call PowerPoint decks training materials, meetings in boxes, change plans, and documentation.

Last week I presented the beginnings of this concept at the Association of Change Management Professionals annual conference in Los Angeles. I took time to go to several sessions, and what I saw was that there’s not much new out there. What I heard over and over was “Change Management isn’t just about communications and training.”

Well guess what, people, it’s ALL about Communications and Training. All that other stuff, the risk analysis, the readiness assessments, the change heat maps…they don’t mean a thing if your end users aren’t aware of what is coming and trained to do their jobs in the new world.

So let’s look at a whole new approach. Let’s start with how we look at change. Change isn’t an “event.” Change is an ongoing process that evolves and grows over time. Second, if you aren’t measuring your success, you likely won’t have any. What I mean by this is, there is ALWAYS a way to measure how successful you have been. And I’m not talking about developing a survey on Survey Monkey—although there is value in customer satisfaction scores. What I’m talking about is looking at real data to tell the story of where you start, what happens with the change, and where you end up in say 3, 6, or 9 months.

The result is that instead of what I call the “check-the-box” mentality of many current change models, we really get people ready for what’s coming. And isn’t that what we intended to do when we started down this career path after all? I know I did.

Portrait of a Change Professional

What does a change person look like?

While we come in many shapes, sizes, colors, and backgrounds, once you know what to look for, you can spot a change person from a mile away. Someone once told me that when you go to a dog park, the Golden Retrievers will spot each other from across the field and end up congregating, running in packs, and playing fetch with one another. True change professionals are the Golden Retrievers of any project. (“True” is the operative word here.)

This is also true of people in our profession. We speak a similar language about people and adoption. We get passionate when we hear of a user population that is going to undergo a particularly drastic change, and we find creative ways to alleviate their discomfort. We might be the Florence Nightingale’s of the corporate world, or simply co-dependent. Whatever we are, we know one another when we find our kindred souls in the life cycle of an implementation.

When a project team hears that a change person has been assigned, there should be a collective sigh of relief. Help is on the way. A good change professional asks smart questions—questions that make technical folks step back and consider a very important audience…the people who will be USING the solution. What a concept!

So we have a functional team, we have a project manager, and now we have a change person assigned to the project. All is well and we’re going to roll out a magical solution that’s going to make end users’ lives better and the company smarter. Right? Not so fast.

Here’s where the idea of a “true” change professional needs to be addressed. Over time Change Management has become diluted to some degree in two ways. First, we have brought non-native change folks into the role based on a reorganization or a backfill. “Bob is a QA guy who is losing his job as part of an outsourcing initiative. Don’t we need a change guy? Let’s give the job to Bob.” Do I really need to elaborate on why this is a bad idea? I think not. Let’s just say that there are many roles that just don’t translate to a great change person.

The second way we dilute the profession is just putting a warm body in the role. We’re up to our elbows in alligators, trying to march to go-live, and we realize we have all sorts of communications that need to go out. The project manager, meaning well, throws a business analyst at the task of building a communications plan and becoming the default change/business analyst. In some ways this could work, and often does, but it’s just not, well, sustainable.

Which brings me to the point I made in my last post. We’ve watered change management down in so many ways that the reason it came into existence is not even clear. We have people in the roles they never should have been assigned to, and let’s face it, most of them never would have chosen to become change people in the first place. We put out bad communications that no one reads and learning collateral that is outdated before the consultants have packed their bags and headed home after go live.

So what does a change person look like? Here’s an admittedly subjective list based on my own experience of working with truly talented, and truly terrible change people.

A “true” change professional should be:

• A Communicator (not just able to write an email, but capable of really communicating)
• A great listener (that’s 50% of the bullet above)
• Creative
• Passionate about the perspective of “the people”
• A Leader (able to stand up for aforementioned “people”
• Compassionate and empathetic
• Technical enough to translate the concepts the functional team are working on to build the solution
• Non-technical enough to understand where the end user is going to run into issues
• A team player
• A community builder

Finding someone with all the traits in this list may seem daunting, but in truth, we’re out there and finding us will save the company money, resources, and frustration in the end. Do we need to be as adorable as a Golden Retriever? Probably not, but it sure couldn’t hurt.

Handcuffed to a Methodology

I learned early on in my career that if I held tight to one single way of doing what I do, I would compromise the work. Yes, it would be great if we had a cookie cutter way of helping people when things change and all hell breaks loose, but let’s face it, not only is that not sustainable, it makes for bad change work and frankly, a boring career.

In 2004 I attended Prosci and learned the ADKAR model. I had already read Kotter and I was leading change projects. I came home with a binder and a head full of common sense and excitement. I had spent three days on a dude ranch in Colorado, learning Prosci’s methodology. Back then, when you were up in the mountains for training, your cell phone wouldn’t even work. We were sequestered and focused. We were asked to come to the training with a problem to solve, a real change project. We would leave with our change plan ready to go.

What I quickly learned is that all the great templates, tools, and tricks that I had learned to use in those three days were only as good as I was a change practitioner. Not only that, but there was no one-size-fits-all  way of approaching change. Here’s what I mean.

Say you go in with the same questions for interviewing stakeholders for 3 projects in a row with the same sponsor. Guess what? Your approach kind of becomes a one trick pony. Not only that, every project is different, and we are missing opportunities when we take what I call a “check the box” mentality to change management.

Here’s where I’m going to suggest again that we need to change the way we do change. In my mind, having done a lot of great work in my career that I’m enormously proud of, while at the same time having participated in change efforts that I’d just as soon forget, I can tell you what goes into a textbook change project.

First of all, if you don’t have your communications strategy nailed now, you won’t be successful. Period. You can create beautiful spreadsheets, gorgeous presentations, and brilliant training collateral, but if no one knows about them, they don’t count. In other words, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” can easily translate to bad communications strategies.

Second, you better know going in how you’re going to measure your success. If you don’t know what success will look like at the end of a change, you are wasting your time and the company’s money. Better stay home and let the chaos take place without putting people through exercises that won’t make a difference.

Last, you may end up having to do some clean up, so you better make sure you are prepared to reinforce that the change stuck. That’s just the fact. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Ron Ashkenas writes that studies continue to show that some 60-70% of all change projects fail. I hate to read that, but I can certainly see why this is. The truth is, we pack up and leave before we know we were successful. We move on to the next thing.

The sad part about all of this is that it’s the “people” who pay for bad change work. Most of us got into this field because we care about the people side, but at the end of the day, we let them down. And it’s on us to figure it out, because if we don’t, we’ll lose our seat at the implementation table.

Performance-Based Change Work

Let’s stop talking about “training.” Let’s not even call it “learning.”

Let’s start talking about performance. Let’s measure it, and when it’s not great, let’s make it better. Period. This is my position on organizational change management.

Just back from another annual SAPPHIRE conference in Orlando, Florida, and now more than ever, I’m convinced that our world as professional change people has got to change. We not only have to change how we do the work, but we need to change the whole vocabulary, the whole language of change.

For one thing, I think the business world is tired of investing in failed change efforts. They are weary of listening to us talk about “the users.” They couldn’t care less about throwing more funding at training initiatives that are expensive and out of date within six months of go-live. If it was up to me, I’d get so embedded in the design of our solutions that we would never need training because we would have an interface that was so easy to use that it wouldn’t require online help, eLearning courses, or job aids. Enter the User Experience guru, please.

After that, when I say that the language needs to change, what I mean is that we need to talk performance and productivity, and we need to include numbers (dollars) in our conversations. We should have a business case for every change effort we do, and instead of spending 100 hours or more on a readiness assessment and a risk analysis that we rarely return to once they are complete, we should provide an estimate of the cost of not improving performance.

Last month at the ACMP conference I listened to a panel discussion, and when the group was asked how they measure their success from a dollar perspective, they all shook their heads and said it really can’t be done. These were not consultants and they weren’t new to the profession. These were very senior change people in industry, and they all believe that you can’t measure how successful a change initiative is. That simply isn’t true.

When we measure performance, we look at data. Now I know many of us chose this field, me included, because we were liberal arts majors and we couldn’t bare the idea of spending our lives doing anything associated with math or science. Here’s the bad news. Almost everything I do as a change professional is one complex word problem after another.

“If a super user takes 3 calls per day and saves the same number of calls to the help desk (at a cost of $15 per call), plus 6 hours of searching for answers for each user who called, and if the average salary of the combined callers, including benefits, is $25 per call, how much money could the company save in 3 years?”

Welcome to my world.

At the end of the day, as I always say, if we aren’t measuring our success or our potential success, how will we know if what we do is working?

So by helping end users get better at what they do, we show the business how to improve performance. Whatever means we choose to use to get them there, the end result is all that really matters.

Why Conferences Are Important

SAPPHIRE Conference, 2011

When it comes to change management, I’ll admit it. I’m a know-it-all.

I think I know more than anyone else and I have very little patience for listening to presentations with slides that show Excel spreadsheets and screenshots of systems that were designed for a company I will never work with. That said, at a minimum I go to at least one industry conference every year, and guess what? I usually come back with nuggets that make me better at what I do.

Nuggets are those little tips and tricks people share that stick in our minds and that we end up using somewhere along the way. Nuggets pile up, and become mounds of brilliance if we keep adding to our knowledge base. I like to hear about interesting ways people approach what we do. I am always fascinated with complex global projects that have to translate across cultural and language lines. Show me an insightful icebreaker and I will steal it quicker than you can close your laptop.

Years ago I heard a presentation from a speaker who would later become a trusted colleague and friend. He said we should always create self-paced learning in a way that makes it easily taught as instructor-led as well. I use that as part of my program today as a best practice.

In addition to nuggets, I go to conferences so I can see what is coming from a technology perspective. I live in the SAP space, so my preference is the annual SAPPHIRE conference. Over the years I have met other professionals who have helped me grow in my trade—and I do think of change, sustainment, OCM, change leadership, or whatever we call it, as a trade. I’ve found interesting tools that have helped my team produce better collateral for our end users.

The other thing about conferences is that it’s good for us to present as well as going to presentations. I submit abstracts every year, and if they are accepted, and many of them are, I get in to the conference free of charge. Presenting is good for my company, and good for me as a professional. It gives me a chance to showcase the exciting work I do, and it helps me stretch all year long as I think of the story I might be able to tell at next year’s conference. This year my presentation at SAPPHIRE is “Do the Math. User Sustainment = High ROI,” and will focus on how we measure what we do—a topic for another post.

At the end of the day, conferences inspire us to be better at what we do. They are an investment that is well worth the cost of entry and a few nights in an event-rate hotel. They help us network with others and let us share what we do, and they show know-it-alls like me that there is still room to learn.