Key Factors That Drive
Sustainable Change Management

Originally aired on 6/3/2020

16 Minutes

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In today’s environment, constant change has become the norm, and the need to adapt to ongoing change has become critical to survival. On an organizational level, as businesses adopt new technologies and processes, it’s just as crucial to understand how these shifts will impact the workforce, and to adopt a viable and sustainable change management strategy to address them.

In this webinar, InEight’s Suzanne Motica discusses how employing an industry-proven change management process and adoption strategy can help you navigate the inevitable turmoil that arises when change arrives.

TRANSCRIPT


John Klobucar:

Hello, I’m John Klobucar with InEight, and I’d like to welcome you to the latest webinar in our Path of Construction series. Today’s webinar is titled Key Factors that Drive Sustainable Change Management. Our presenter today is Suzanne Motica, who is InEight’s Vice President of Services Delivery. In this role, Suzanne is responsible for customer success, client solutions, service delivery training, and in InEight’s project management office under a Suzanne’s leadership, the InEight’s Services Delivery team has been focused on training in both construction and engineering processes and best practices in product implementation. If you have any questions as you watch the webinar, please enter them in the chat box located on the left side of the screen, and Suzanne will do her best to answer them following the webinar. Also, this presentation is being recorded, and I’ll be sending you a link to the video in about a week’s time. Once again, we’re glad you’ve joined us. And now let me introduce Suzanne Motica.

Suzanne Motica:

Thank you, John. Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining. I have been working with technology implementations for the last 10 years, and the biggest lesson learned that I have personally experienced is the need to put change management at the forefront of the project. Not thinking of how the change will impact all parties, how it will make people feel about the adjustments, or even wholesale changes to the work they do every single day. Addressing this early and communicating right from the start will identify risks, and also give employees and users a voice and a chance to be involved. Communication doesn’t always solve adoption issues, but it does provide you with time to put a plan in place to address any issues or dissenters.

Suzanne Motica:

The definition of change management is the structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, or organizations from a current state to a desired future state. As organizations continue to adopt new technologies, standard processes, or organizational changes, it’s imperative to understand how these changes will impact your workforce and how to adopt a viable strategy for this change. By employing change management and adoption strategies, you can navigate through the inevitable turmoil when change arrives. While change is inevitable and necessary in the current business climate, it’s not always easy to achieve. In fact, according to a study by McKenzie, 70% of change management programs fail to achieve their goals.

Suzanne Motica:

The meaning of change management has evolved over time. In the past, the term was associated with something like an immediate response to tackle big, often negative initiatives, such as a hostile merger or company downsizing. Today, change management is widely accepted. It’s about building fundamental employee engagement and getting everyone aligned towards a common goal. So make it personal. That’s not really hard to do. If nothing else, have a clear communication plan right at the beginning, that addresses things like, “What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How does it impact me? How does it benefit me? How does it benefit the company?” When you engage from the beginning and make it personal, you’re more likely to generate excitement and buy-in from the very beginning, rather than isolating the project or initiative and expecting adoption at the deployment stage. Trust me, if you wait until deployment and expect adoption, you won’t get it.

Suzanne Motica:

We know change management has been successful when we see firsthand these key common elements of effective project implementations. Clear communication of vision and objectives. Everyone on the team must understand the desired in state and why it’s crucial to work towards it. Strong project sponsorship and champions who fully promote and embrace the changes and spread support for the initiatives to others. Sufficient resources, dedicated to the activities required with clear roles and responsibilities. Deep understanding of the change pattern individuals must go through for an organization to realize the desired outcomes.

Suzanne Motica:

On the flip side, change can all too often fail in an organization when there is no clear picture of the future, insufficient buy-in from the team, whether that’s at the executive level or all the way down to the end users, an underestimation of the amount of work involved, a shortage of resources to implement these changes, a lack of leadership ownership, or focus, and a failure to prioritize people management and the change process each individual must go through.

Suzanne Motica:

Now, I’m going to switch gears and take you through the process that we put together at InEight. We start our change management discussions during presales, since the successful adoption of our tools is just as important to us as the initial sale. We can get a contract signed, we can have a successful delivery and do all of the right things with the team that the client provides us, but that team is usually a small one. And if communication doesn’t happen across the organization, or if it doesn’t happen well, then end users are likely not to adopt the tools once we finished the deployment, and then we’ve both failed. The client has made an investment that they’re not going to see the ROI on. And we at InEight won’t see the utilization and adoption, which is critical for InEight to continue to be a leader in construction and engineering software.

Suzanne Motica:

I mentioned the client team. Included in this team should be a sponsor that has organizational influence and extensive business knowledge. We partner with the sponsor and provide change management support and guidance from our dedicated client success team.

Suzanne Motica:

Our iterative process starts with identifying what needs to change and then looking at how will we make that change? And ultimately, how will we know if we’re successful? We then back into what success looks like and put together a strategy, utilizing an InEight’s people-centric change management approach, providing you with a roadmap to communicate, coach, and support stakeholders through the implementation of our solutions, driving positive and sustainable change. We incorporate change management into project implementation activities from the very, very start, which assists the projects with informing, engaging, and enabling all users to participate in the change, which results in higher adoption and a deeper benefits realization.

Suzanne Motica:

It all starts with understanding the needs of your specific organization. Once we have that understanding, we partner with you to create a change management strategy that includes a stakeholder analysis to secure that buy-in. A change impact assessment, to understand the change, a communications plan that identifies all communication that needs to happen, the medium in which it occurs and the timing. A training plan, your coaching plan, and a resistance management plan if needed. We also help you identify areas of risk or impacts to the project, whether that is system or people related, and recommend the best approach for implementing your change management plans.

Suzanne Motica:

Our change management approach is based on human-centered design and behavioral economics empower you to strengthen the end user’s ability to adopt our solutions. We want to ensure proposed changes align with your business objectives and identify the appropriate executive sponsor and the key impacted stakeholder groups. We will engage the project stakeholders by communicating key organizational and personal benefits of the software at all levels to align all users to the common goal of adopting the solutions. We will use the momentum that is generated and the InEight learning resources to infuse new knowledge, skills, and processes to enable a new way of working. We will measure, coach, and reinforce the changes as users evolved by linking key project objectives to individual and project metrics. We will listen to feedback, diagnose gaps, manage resistance, implement the corrective actions needed. And most importantly, we will celebrate the successes along the way.

Suzanne Motica:

Our guiding principles for change are, make it personal or better yet, make it epic. This is where the excitement can happen. Show the big picture. Don’t just show the change in a silo. Let everyone see the project as a whole and why the change is vital to the company. Prioritize what matters and reinforce the data, showing evidence of any modifications needed or even better, any successful outcomes.

Suzanne Motica:

I’ll now take you through the key activities and deliverables within InEight’s change management process. At a high level, the process is identification of current state. Where we’re at right now, what’s not working, why it’s not working?

Suzanne Motica:

Envision your future. Where do you want to be? How would that benefit the company? How would that benefit you? What is the ROI?

Suzanne Motica:

Prepare for change. A lot of the work we’ve been talking about is done here. Awareness, communication, and training are all addressed during this phase.

Suzanne Motica:

Deliver impact. This is where we’re ready to go. The project is launching and users are trained and ready and it’s time to start seeing success and benefits realization.

Suzanne Motica:

Monitor and reinforce. Ideally, we’ve had a successful launch, but guess what, we’re never really done, are we? We want to continue seeing positive ROI, adoption and continuous improvement.

Suzanne Motica:

In this next section, I’ll take you through the process we went through in a little more detail, and also talk about some of the deliverables we provide. So to identify the current state, we will spend a lot of time getting to know your organization and review the project strategy and vision, identify any potential challenges and barriers to change. And that includes any skills and behavioral gaps. We’ll identify key stakeholders, assess the business case and transformation vision. We’ll define leadership roles and conduct alignment workshops. We’ll identify communications and engagement opportunities to help you understand what activities will empower your people to anticipate, shape, and accelerate change. The key deliverables in this phase are the change readiness assessment, the stakeholder impact analysis, and we’ll focus on the communication plan, which will continue to be built out.

Suzanne Motica:

During envision your future, we are gathering information on what success looks like for you, as well as the readiness for change within your organization. We do this by assisting you in refining your future vision, that aligns change management goals with your business objectives. We will provide guidance in defining project goals, and what do the success metrics look like? We will partner with you to develop a change impact assessment, to understand readiness and how key stakeholders will be impacted in terms of process, technology, or organizational changes. The deliverables during this phase include the change impact assessment, the change strategy, and the training plan and curriculum associated.

Suzanne Motica:

Preparing for change is where most of the work happens. Working with your leadership, we will provide a strategy framework in building out plan and strategies to build awareness, drive engagement, and manage expectations and resistance. We will define skills and behaviors and identify gaps between current and future state. We will identify key change influencers and champions within your organization and provide training and coaching. The deliverables in this space are the sponsorship model and competency assessment, the final communication plan and the final training plan.

Suzanne Motica:

Deliver impact is when we launch. The system or process is built, tested, trained, communicated about, and we’re ready to go. The key steps include the final communication efforts. The end users now have access to all learning environments and training and we’ll launch and manage the change agent network to make sure we have continued successful adoption.

Suzanne Motica:

Now we’re done, but again, are we ever really done? We still need to monitor and manage the change impact on employees. We do that by using proactive data analytics and information gathering by tracking progress and adjusting plans as needed. We gather and act upon any stakeholder feedback and implement corrective actions. And most importantly, we celebrate the successes.

Suzanne Motica:

Change management is something I’m really passionate about. And that passion comes from personally failing on large implementations by not making the human factor a significant success component and leaving it up to leadership to mandate the change down. That simply does not work. As you all know, change is the new norm. So we have to incorporate viable and sustainable change management strategies to understand and mitigate the impact to the workforce. At InEight, we have differentiated ourselves by building a dedicated client success team that is not only certified in change management, but has extensive experience in the construction and engineering industry and understands those business processes and business impacts. Our team provides a wealth of best practices and lessons learned from prior implementations. Thank you all for your time today. We’ll turn it back over to you, John.

John Klobucar:

Thank you, Suzanne. Again, if you have any questions about the webinar, please enter them in the chat box on the left side of the screen. To learn more about InEight, as well as our broad portfolio of construction project management solutions, visit ineight.com, and click on the request a demo button. And if you’d like to see a schedule of upcoming webinars, visit ineight.com/webinars. Thank you for watching. This concludes our presentation.

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