SAP to Salesforce roll-out: How to bring these changes quickly?

Remember days when you had to transfer from one school to another? One city to another due to some family reason?

What was the experience like with these changes ( Good, Bad & Ugly)? I had to do such things many times as my father in a job where he has to transfer cities.

It is a significant shift for me, as I have to change my friends, new school in the new city.

New place to play and make new associate.

How do we make such change easy in corporate life when we shift a large system with a more modern system? e.g. SAP system to Salesforce system with many real-time users.

What are risk of losing something? What is the risk of business disruption?

What are the major resistance on the way to adopt this modern system?

• People from the systems users will protest as they have to relearn and redo everything in a new way.
• Leadership is not interest to hear complain from their team members, so they are missing in the show!
• Cost increases a lot of time will go for understanding the system

What do we work out to carry out those transformations smoothly?

How can we carry out this transformation minimum impact?

We have looked into all these areas to take care of the change.

We have set the objective to safeguard our success in this new system adoption journey.

There are a few phases where we maintain all these change steps

• Analysis phase
• Configuration phase
• Data Migration phase
• Parallel run phase
• Decommission phase

We follow this model ( ADKAR)

a) Awareness

b) Desire

c) Knowledge

d) Ability

e) Reinforcement

We commenced with small pilots. and those feedbacks from the pilot integrated into further work.

We did an impact analysis of the system, identified the target impacted team members

Got their leadership buy-in at this approach.

Let us examine how each area we have enhanced.

Awareness :

Changing into a new system, requires expanding the awareness through Demo, Training, and learning videos, Quiz etc.

There must be a focus group or learning clinic which can promote the people’s knowledge.

When I change to many cities! My elder brother used to do this for me!! Discovering all the unknown and sharing with me!!

Desire:

A few special schemes have been created to enhance the desire for new systems usages. Competency lead discussed with the team members weekly to ensure the new system adoption. Feedback has been provided for improvement. There are award granted for the finest performer based on the new system usages.

Knowledge:

Special award is offered to complete the online learning course on a definite timeline. People who have completed the mandatory trainings, special acknowledgement has been presented to them. Some of these people have been attracted to community meetings for sharing their insights.

Ability:

With the support of the manager, it has been identified who needed training, and who needs mentoring and who requires long-term coaching. Pair support has been established with experts whenever there are some gaps discovered in system usages with some team members.

Reinforcement:

Newsletter with several rounds of community sessions to ensure new system knowledge is growing. There are many small video created and run frequent in visible places to ensure change persist. There are weekly article distributed about the improvement done by the team members.

When I was changing the city, my parents used to invite new families to our home for dinner! My mother is a very good cook! Everyone loved to come to our house for new dishes. I have familiarized the people faster in a process, new friends, new information by sitting at home!

There were one-to-one coaching sessions formed for many of the system users to find out their concerns. The as-is analysis to “to-be” analysis conducted initially has been revised based on some vital feedback. There are some focus group members formed to drive the education program.

What more could have been done?

Collecting and Analyzing Feedback:

Many teams fall into the trap of completing their change management checklist without listening to what employees have to say. The feedback you gather will be helpful in developing corrective actions and post-implementation change management activities. There are a number of different ways to gather employee feedback, including the employee feedback template.

“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” — Ken Blanchar

Audit Compliance with the new Process, Systems and Job Roles Changes are successful when they are fully implemented and embraced in an organization. Auditing performance ensures that the change is taking place and that the business is realizing the full benefit of the new improvement. How you audit compliance will be very specific to the change you are introducing. The project team can define what these new processes, systems and roles look like and they can specify the key metrics that will be measured after the implementation. Methods for measuring compliance include:

• Observation
• Performance reports
• System usage

How often is the “old way of doing things” still used?

Analyze the effectiveness of your change management activities.

Feedback and compliance show how well change management is working. Analyzing these inputs and identifying key lessons provides direction for corrective actions, if applicable. For example, you can use this data to identify root causes, diagnose gaps and manage resistance.

Celebrate Successes:

Celebrating successes not only increases morale, but it builds support among those that may need to “see it to believe it.”

Constantly seek evidence of major milestones and identify early successes, even if they are small. Here are some hints to create successful celebrations:

• Organize ways to recognize groups and individuals
• Make it public
• Use normal meetings as an avenue for recognition of achievement
• Ensure key sponsors and stakeholders are aware of these achievements
• Involve managers in the chain of command to award these recognitions
• Provide supervisors with ways to recognize their employees

For low-cost celebration ideas, get your team together and brainstorm.

You will be surprised at the low cost, creative ideas your team comes up with and how well those ideas are received.

Conduct After-Action Reviews:

Perform an after-action review for your project. An after-action review is a post-project analysis of what worked and what did not.

This analysis results in lessons learned for the next project. Learn from your mistakes and also from your successes. Begin to build change management competency into the organization. Keep in mind that the after-action review has several sources of information, besides the change management team including:

• Employees impacted by the change
• Customers and suppliers in the process
• Sponsors, stakeholders, and managers in the organization
• Input from each of these groups should be considered when evaluating your overall performance.
• The outcome of this activity should be documented through lessons learned and changes to the change management process for the next project.

All these steps secured the new system change which has come, adopted faster to all the impacted team members.

We understand that one size does not fit all. Force fitting does not work. So we continue to change our approach based on the individuals feedback with whom we are working with. We must say as program committee members, we were flexible. We listened a lot for this change.

Of course we have many best change leaders working with us, who are training change managers in these change initiatives.