Brandee Fantini – Principal
Every member of the project team has a role to play in driving change, readying people, and creating the environment for successful implementation. In your role as project lead, you have a lot on your plate: delivering a solution that works, budget and time constraints, the engagement and wellness of the project team, engaging the business, adapting plans to new requirements and constraints, and keeping executives in the loop. You have overall responsibility for managing relationships with your implementation, software, and change management partners. Doing so well means creating a cohesive team across multiple functions and lines of business.
Dan Clark, Oracle Project Lead, PPG Industries, Inc., provides this guidance:
“When issues arise, escalate early and often. Don’t have more than a couple of meetings on any subject because spinning on decisions wastes time and money. Make a decision and move on.”
Value of change management to project leads
It might be misleading to say that all these responsibilities are easier with an experienced change management team leading people readiness for your system implementation. But it is completely fair to say that your effectiveness in driving these outcomes is greatly enhanced by engaging an experienced change team to help you:
- Build a trust-based, cohesive team that works together effectively and efficiently.
- Drive engagement of the project team and mitigate issues or overwork risks (knowing when to adjust timeline, request more resources, reduce scope, etc.).
- Identify and address issues with the solution and/or system by working closely with future end users who know what will and won’t work.
- Organize and facilitate team-building activities to build trust, engagement, and commitment.
- Work directly with super users, leaders, and future end users at sites and business units to prepare them for upcoming changes (at a much more granular level than you’d be able to reach without them).
- Understand and mitigate prioritization issues that come from executive leaders asking frontline leaders to deliver results that conflict with your project resourcing needs.
- Balance competing demands on super user and workstream/process leaders’ time to ensure system and people readiness are both adequately resourced.
Your role in driving change
Bring the change lead into the inner circle. Most project teams establish a senior leadership team (either formally or informally), including the project lead, project manager, solution architect, and a few others. Invite your change lead to be part of that group so they can hear about what’s on your mind, upcoming activities and events, and risks and challenges. It’s also critical to hear first-hand from the change lead what’s happening on the ground with soon-to-be end users and the project team. This helps keep everyone rowing in the same direction.
Other tips:
- Invest in team and individual development. Enable your change team to drive these efforts.
- Listen deeply and intently to all constituents—not to immediately react, but to hear themes and identify complex issues that might not be readily evident.
- Work closely with the change team to size and scope the super user network appropriately based on geography, number of end users, level of change, and function. Help convince other leaders that intense super user involvement is one of the most important factors in successfully going live without negative impact on the business or customers.
- Engage the change team to monitor, track, and report on super user engagement throughout the project. Many times, super users are set up for failure because they aren’t given adequate time and support by their direct managers. Your change team will see those problems before anyone else does, but they need your support to mitigate them.
- Help project team members choose the right “battles” and see when to dig into an issue and when to let one go.
- Engage the business (whomever the change will be impacting). Spend time with them to understand their priorities, how they measure those
- priorities, what obstacles they might encounter in supporting the implementation, and what business challenges they need to solve.
Inspire and motivate others to high performance. Expect a lot, give a lot of yourself, and hold others accountable in a way that encourages engagement and excellence.
In addition to your role as project lead, there are several key roles in the project team AND the change management team for driving change and systems adoption. To learn more, check out our insights on:
If you’d like to connect with our team to learn more about driving systems adoption, give us a call at 859-415-1000 or reach out through the form below.
