Often technology implementations can become so focused on the technological part of it that organizations forget the most important element: people. Even with the best-laid technology, if nobody understands what's going on, the project is at risk of failure. Change management ensures organizations connect the dots between technical implementations and their broader goals and initiatives, creating a bridge between technology and people.
People feel empowered when they take part in the transition process when change management and employee training is introduced. Change management invites them to take part in the movement and decisions the company makes as it works toward change. It allows for feedback, questions and suggestions from the people most affected to influence the greater process.
What is change management?
Change management is the structured process a company uses to smoothly implement change within its organization. It incorporates disciplines like psychology, engineering, and behavioral science to make logical adjustments to business functions and help people cope with and adapt to differences in their environment.
Change management encompasses several elements including training and communications to build awareness and excitement for the upcoming changes, to help the organization understand what the future will be and to teach them the skills to accomplish the desired future state with defined business outcomes.
Sometimes, companies invest millions of dollars in technology implementations without a clear understanding of why they’re doing it. Decisions are often driven by reasons like expiring licenses rather than strategic objectives. Change management helps ensure that any implementation is tied to measurable goals. For instance, we assist organizations in evaluating the engagement of executive sponsors to ensure leadership alignment and clarity around objectives like becoming fiscally efficient or eliminating redundant systems.
To achieve this, organizations need to articulate their goals, whether that’s improving cost efficiency, streamlining processes, or driving innovation. By tying the implementation to an executive or organizational strategic plan, we ensure that projects drive meaningful value.
Importance of change management
Organizational change management is a necessity for company success, growth, and employee morale. It helps employees understand the need for change, aligns their efforts with the company's goals, and provides the necessary support for them to navigate through transformative periods and overcome barriers to change. This, in turn, leads to higher employee morale and buy-in, productivity, and overall business performance.
Additionally, change management directly impacts key stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, and business partners. By effectively managing change, an organization can maintain strong relationships with its stakeholders, ensuring their support and collaboration during periods of transition.
Increasing technology project success rates
Change management can increase project success rates for an organization by ensuring people are prioritized throughout the change. It provides a support structure that employees can rely on while progressing through the implementation process to encourage digital adoption.
Employee engagement and morale
When confronting change, how you feel about the transition can be just as important as the steps you take to make it happen. Involving key stakeholders aids transparency by helping people understand the need for changes as well as the environment and culture of the company. It helps to foster a shared commitment to learning and evolution to achieve the desired goal. When employees are actively involved in the change process and understand the reasons behind it, they are also less likely to experience job-related stress. This leads to improved morale as employees feel valued and supported throughout the transition.
A clear, shared vision
Organizational change often stems from leadership’s vision for a new and improved future state. Learning how to share this vision and interpret it in the context of change and development can help people understand what they're working toward. This clarity motivates people and smooths the transition process, enabling the organization to move forward with purpose and confidence.
Navigating the process of change: five key steps for change management success
Effective change management is essential for moving individuals through change and helping them understand the value of adoption at an individual level. Building a strategic adoption change management plan to accelerate the human transformation in line with technical deployment is critical. Using Prosci’s ADKAR framework, a proven methodology widely applied in technology and IT projects, we outline the five key steps in the process to ensure adoption and maximize ROI, replacing guesswork with a structured path to success.
1. Awareness
Awareness is a crucial first step in any change management process. It involves ensuring the organization not only knows a change is happening but also deeply understands the need for the change and can articulate it clearly at every level. This understanding must be compelling, grounded in the organization’s strategic plan, and often driven by executive leadership, such as the CEO, CFO, CHRO, and CIO.
To build this awareness, develop a strategic adoption change management and communications plan that seamlessly delivers the right messages at the right time. Effective communication ensures the need for change is reinforced through multiple channels, delivered by trusted influencers, and repeated consistently to resonate across the organization.
Define a clear and compelling vision statement that highlights why the change is necessary now and connects it to better business results. Engage executive sponsors to champion the change and communicate its significance, ensuring alignment with organizational priorities.
Create a change champions network with individuals across all key departments or workstreams to ensure peer-to-peer influence and support. Equip these champions with the knowledge and tools they need to socialize the change effectively, fostering a positive perception and encouraging widespread buy-in across teams.
2. Desire
To foster desire for change, it’s essential to help individuals understand the personal and organizational benefits of adopting new tools and processes. Start by putting yourself in the shoes of business users and answering the critical question, “What’s in it for me?” Articulate how the future state is significantly better than the current state, highlighting improvements in efficiency, ease, and outcomes. For example, transitioning from paper-based expense reports and emailed spreadsheets to an automated system like Oracle eliminates chaos, allows for easy tracking, and simplifies approvals, making the process more streamlined and transparent.
Even when individuals don’t have a choice but to use the new technology, it’s crucial to make them feel good about the transition. Focus on communicating the tangible benefits of the new way of working, such as performance improvements, security enhancements, and time savings. By comparing the old and new processes, you can demonstrate how the change makes their jobs easier and more effective.
Engage your executive sponsors and change champions to reinforce these positive aspects. When leadership and peers actively support the change, it helps create a positive perception and mobilizes individuals to embrace new tools and capabilities.
Another effective tactic for building desire is through rewards and recognition. Consider planning initiatives such as contests with gift prizes or having sponsors recognize early adopters who contribute to the project’s success. This not only incentivizes participation but also energizes momentum for the change.
3. Knowledge
Building knowledge is a critical component of successful technology adoption, requiring both effective communication and comprehensive training. Knowledge involves equipping users with the information and skills they need to transition seamlessly to new tools and processes. This requires a structured, disciplined approach—not ad hoc communications or scattered efforts.
Develop a centralized and well-documented communication plan to guide the process. A clear roadmap outlining the current, transitional, and future states of the project is essential. For example, during a Microsoft Teams rollout, it’s important to identify the tools currently used for collaboration and document management and clearly communicate how Teams will provide enhanced capabilities in the future.
Training is another key aspect of building knowledge. Alithya specializes in creating custom training programs tailored to meet the unique needs of each organization. These programs leverage a combination of methods, including traditional blended learning, digital adoption platforms, videos, job aids, and instructor-led sessions. The goal is to use multiple channels and formats to ensure knowledge transfer is accessible and engaging for all users.
The combination of a disciplined communication strategy with robust training efforts helps users eliminate confusion, build confidence, and drive effective technology adoption.
4. Ability
While knowledge focuses on understanding, ability is about translating that understanding into action—helping individuals change their behaviors to align with the future state. For example, in a new technology implementation, managers accustomed to relying on HR for tasks like opening job requisitions will need to take ownership of these processes themselves in the new system. Building ability means ensuring users are not only trained but also empowered and held accountable to adopt these new behaviors effectively.
Establishing a comprehensive training plan is critical for enabling employees to make these changes. Training should go beyond technical instructions to clearly communicate expectations for behavior in the future state. For example, when creating materials, ensure they explicitly outline what is expected of each role, helping employees understand their responsibilities and how they contribute to the success of the project.
It’s also important to provide accessible resources to support this transition. A centralized platform, such as an intranet or Yammer site, can host essential project information, including timelines, user impacts, how-to instructions, webinars, training materials, use-case scenarios, and success stories. These resources serve as ongoing references to reinforce learning and encourage the consistent application of new behaviors.
By being deliberate about training, communication, and setting expectations, organizations can bridge the gap between users knowing what to do, actually doing it, and being accountable for these new processes.
5. Reinforcement
One step many organizations miss is reinforcing technology changes after the initial deployment. This may result in an uptick of adoption initially, but then individuals revert to the old way of working.
Effective reinforcement ensures that goals are met, and that adoption becomes a sustained behavior, not a temporary adjustment.
Reinforcement begins with identifying specific goals and metrics to measure success. For example, in talent acquisition, measuring the Time to Fill (TTF)—the time from job requisition approval to offer acceptance—can help reduce recruitment cycle time. For payroll process improvements, tracking payroll cycle time enhances financial visibility and control. In financial operations, measuring business days to close books indicates efficiency in the financial closing cycle.
Another key reinforcement approach is to collect and communicate success stories. Champions can surface these stories and gather use cases demonstrating how new tools and capabilities can address pain points and enhance workflows. These insights can highlight improvements such as reduced recruitment cycles or payroll accuracy to showcase tangible benefits.
Integrating change management goals with performance management systems and aligning them with pay plans strengthens reinforcement. When adoption of new processes ties directly to performance evaluations or rewards, it provides a strong incentive to sustain change.
By addressing awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement in alignment with the rollout of new technology, you will benefit from more positive workforce perception, build a more change-agile culture, and maximize your ROI. Alithya supports clients with organizational change management consulting. Safeguard your transformation project and ensure ROI on your technology investment by contacting our experts today.