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 Sponsor of a system implementation effort, you make or strongly influence budget decisions, sit on the steering committee, and have significant influence on project decisions, including people resourcing. You are involved in creating the business case and ensuring ROI is delivered. What you choose to focus on, what metrics get measured, the questions you ask, and your expectations significantly impact how the project team spends its time and how they think about challenges and solutions.
Your support of the project behind the scenes and visibly to the rest of the organization demonstrates your keen interest in helping the project team succeed. You work closely with the Project Lead and other key project leaders to closely monitor project risks. You help make decisions when there are dissenting viewpoints and mitigate issues that get in the way.
If you don’t already have a close working relationship with your Change Lead, start building one. Many a challenge has been discussed, root cause identified and swift path to resolution formed through conversation between the change lead and the sponsor. Connect with your change team in a way that feels authentic and comfortable to you.
The change team is your ear to the ground across the organization. Odds are good that they understand aspects of your business that you don’t fully understand (that’s normal and perfectly okay). When the change team is external, generally the understanding is even greater because it’s easier to ask questions, dig deep, spot trends, and see impacts to project and people readiness. If you’re getting all your information from PowerPoints, meetings, and the Project Lead, broaden your sources for heightened awareness and a wider perspective.
The change team also serves to provide you with concise, targeted communication tools to leverage in advocating for project goals, creating awareness, mitigating barriers, addressing resistance, and leading change.
1. Change management is a critical driver of ROI and overall project success—don’t let change, communication, and training budgets get cut or minimized. You invest in people because they are a critical factor in the success of any systems implementation.
2. Be THE change leader. Your role in leading (and driving) change is significant. Employees want to do what makes them successful in their roles, and you define what success looks like. You also have the power to define the criteria that drives change and adoption. Look for opportunities to share your vision for the future, address the tradeoffs that are required to attain the vision, and work to remove barriers to success.
3. There’s a fine line between inspiring others to high performance and asking for more than people can deliver, causing them to disengage. Setting clear priorities that aren’t competing with one another will enable your teams to be successful. When priorities are competing, adjust outcome and timeline expectations so that no one is asked for more than they can feasibly deliver.
4. Resourcing is a critical enabler of systems implementation projects. It’s vital to understand resourcing models and implications, so that you can go to bat for more resources when needed—or set expectations with executives and others that outcomes will be different than expected if resourcing needs aren’t met.
5. Timelines and budgets are difficult to pinpoint before doing the work. Buffered timelines and contingency budget planning enable teams to adapt to change (because the unforeseeable inevitably happens). You cannot know today what obstacles and circumstances will arise to require additional time and funding, but they WILL arise. Prepare for and expect them.
6. Network extensively within the project team, doing skip-level discussions with various workstreams, levels, and roles. Work closely with the business to prepare them for the change. Listen intently to their concerns and time/resource constraints and do what’s necessary for them to succeed. For significant change efforts, delay or relax other initiatives where possible to enable everyone to put their focus, attention, and priority on Go Live.
7. Empower your change team. Ask about people readiness, include it on scorecards, expect your change lead at every steering committee meeting, and mitigate people risks with as much energy and diligence as process or system risks. Set the tone for camaraderie and teamwork across implementation, change, and other third-party partners.
In addition to your role as Sponsor, 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.