Meeting the challenge of managing change

Minimizing the dip in workplace production is key for IT managers making changes

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The most basic courses or readings in change management teach us that there is a relatively strong correlation between change in the workplace and productivity.

Indeed, there is a typical productivity profile associated with workplace change. The profile shows an inevitable dip in productivity immediately following the onset of a change. Mitigating the magnitude and duration of this productivity dip has given rise to the discipline of change management. So, what does this mean to those of us responsible for affecting our organization's use of information technology?

There are generally two types of workplace change: incremental and transformational. Incremental change refers to relatively frequent small scale changes. In IT terms, incremental changes could be in the form of desktop hardware upgrades or installing the newest version of an existing system. Transformational change refers to major shifts in ways of doing business. Examples in the IT world would be replacing a legacy system with a client/server application or replacing a collection of "best of breed" applications with an integrated enterprise system.

In reality, many of today's organizations are bombarded with both incremental and transformational information technology changes as they struggle to keep current, gain a competitive edge, maintain existing service levels while reducing costs or simply to beat the year 2000 bug. The City of Brampton is no exception.

In the area of incremental change, we have recently gone through an upgrade of our desktop tool suite. We have also implemented some network upgrades and we are in the process of replacing one-third of our PC inventory, which is an annual event. While our internal clients do seem to appreciate the new tools and improved desktop performance, they can get a little "change weary" as they experience small but regular disruptions to their work schedules. Some simple practices that we have put in place to avert potential change weariness include reviewing possible clustering of incremental changes and doing more work to forewarn clients of pending changes so that they can adjust their work schedules in advance. We also provide more information about why the change is being made and what can be expected during and after the change.

As for transformational change, the City of Brampton is implementing four major systems including new tax, infrastructure management, land development tracking and payroll/HRIS systems. Any one of these systems unto itself would result in substantial change for the organization since each system crosses departmental lines. Implementation of all four systems will result in unprecedented change for the organization, particularly in cases where certain staff will be using all four systems to do their job. Combine this degree of transformational change with the incremental changes described earlier and you have the makings of some potentially serious negative productivity impacts. Seeing this potential storm brewing on the horizon, we decided to be proactive and make a significant investment in developing the change management skills of the project teams responsible for delivering these major systems.

Developing change management skills across the city's project teams began with setting three important design criteria.

First, we wanted the entire core team for each project to learn the concepts of change management.

This approach was preferred over sending one or two team members on a course and leaving them with the challenge of trying to convince the remaining team members about the need for change management.

Secondly, we wanted to achieve a high level of continuity between change management strategies deployed by the four project teams.

Given that many of the city's staff would be recipients of more than one of the new systems, it would be important to achieve some degree of consistency in how their change experience was managed for each system.

If we could make the change experience more predictable as the systems were rolled out, then we could increase our chances of reducing productivity losses associated with "fear of the unknown."

Finally, we wanted the change management education to be practical. If we were going to ask four entire project teams to shoehorn a course into already challenging schedules, they had better leave the course feeling they achieved something.

Working with a consultant from Oracle Corp.'s change management practice, we mapped out a customized course that would meet our design criteria. The final product was a two-day workshop oriented course that all four teams would attend together. Seating was arranged according to project teams so that members could discuss and work on issues specific to their own project.

The morning of day one focused on a review of the effects of change and their relevance to large system implementation. Day two began with the teams learning ways to manage change issues like those identified on the previous day.

The course finished with a collective discussion of lessons learned and ideas about how we could achieve a higher level of continuity between change management strategies for the four projects.

Without a doubt, the most important benefit from our change management initiative has been the growing emphasis on "how" IT projects are delivered.

Our project teams realize that taking steps to mitigate change-related productivity loss is an essential part of a successful project.

Source:

Robert Parent, Organizational Change Management Practice, Oracle Canada

John Wright is the Director of Information Technololy for the City of Brampton. He can be reached at jonn.wright@city.brampton.on.ca or at (905) 874-2021.

Copyright Plesman Publications Ltd. Aug 1998
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