Brandee Fantini – Principal and Strategy Activator As a developer, your focus is the system, processes, and making it all work as expected for end users and business leaders. You might not be directly involved with people readiness strategies and activities, but you play a significant role in both. In developing the process or application, you put yourself in the shoes of the user. You work to gain a solid understanding of the process until you fully comprehend the end-to-end processes executed within the system and outside of the system.
“The change team understands some of the critical tips and tips for better user adoption. Efficiency often lies in a few small details that allow the business to achieve the desired results,” said Doug Whiting, Global SAP Practice at DXC.
Change management is valuable to you because it drives adoption of the process improvement you poured blood, sweat, and tears into creating.
The change team helps bring the project team closer to end users. While business process/workstream leads are usually chosen for their deep expertise in current systems and processes, a broader perspective from end users is always needed. The change team expands those connections and is a partner in listening intently to end users so that requirements are clear and obstacles are identified and resolved, allowing people to focus on adopting the processes you’ve built.
Unless people are using the system as intended and without questions, it’s important to dig deeper into the “why.” Sometimes it’s process issues, sometimes it’s lack of communication or training, and sometimes the system is too cumbersome or challenging, so workarounds become the norm. Limitation in the software can also lead to challenges.
As end users start to engage in system demos, training, and practice, you play an important role in easing anxiety, answering questions, and troubleshooting challenges when the unexpected happens. Those unexpected results provide great learning opportunities. When you can quickly explain why that result occurred and how to adjust to get a different result, you’re driving adoption. The sense of confidence that end users achieve from learning the system is contagious, and it helps others gain confidence as well.
Work closely with end users to truly understand their needs and ways of working and listen intently to what’s important to them. That way, you will be best positioned to offer options and solutions that work. Ask questions, challenge the existing process, and offer alternative (more efficient) ways of thinking that are possible with a new system. Take the opportunity to provide process improvements, which go hand in hand with new system implementations.
At the end of the day, remember that tensions between system and people readiness are inevitable and healthy. It helps to be balanced in prioritizing. Great people with a positive mindset can often make a bad system work, but rarely will people make a system work when they don’t want it to work.
In addition to your role as End User, 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.