MSG Q&A: Organizational Change Management - January 16, 2023

More Solutions Group (MSG) has invested a significant amount of time in the development of our Organizational Change Management Offering (OCM). We have and will continue to do this because we find that OCM is integral for maintaining customer satisfaction, optimal communication, and end user adoption when a significant change in IT is taking place. OCM is the only way to guarantee that a customer is able to quickly realize the full value of their investment, ensuring successful project completion, adoption of the changes by end users, and improvements to operations and ultimately the customer’s business.

Though we have realized the above, it is still not always easy to position and sell an OCM component to a Project or Program. We sat down with our Senior Lead, Todd Chaney, to discuss the common questions that come up, and then leveraged his experience to put together some quality responses.

• MSG: How do you help customers understand that they need OCM and that they can’t go through a large technical transformation/migration/upgrade on their own?
• TC: Clients that reach out for assistance with larger technical projects often do not have the additional bandwidth elsewhere in the organization to help with change management for many of the same reasons they didn't have the bandwidth for the technical project to begin with.  For smaller projects we try to position some assistance with messaging and user impact, for larger engagements we want to have the complete conversation about how they are managing the transition, tracking participation and requirements, and integrating this all into scheduling.

• MSG: So you are talking about project management, right?  How is this different?
• TC: This effort can encompass project management for the engagement or work alongside it.  In our experience traditional PM roles on technical projects either do not do enough or do not know enough to manage the change effectively. Effective management in this case includes a full knowledge campaign and all end user communications, potentially working with users both pre- and post- migration, and in the case of larger efforts managing a dynamic schedule for the engagement that has integrated workflow management.

• MSG: When do you start scoping?  Is it part of a single project or can it cover multiple projects in a program?
• TC: This can be executed as project or program management, the scale of the effort should be targeted for the level that provides the best results with respect to minimizing the impact to users.  Related projects that are part of a larger on-going technology initiative frequently will benefit from a level of integrated messaging across the entire initiative to make the messaging easier to understand and better prepare the users.  This effort can also begin at the scale of a project and grow to encompass an entire program.

• MSG: What information do you need to gather to scope?  Who do you work with on the customer side and who do you work with on the technical delivery team side?
• TC: Key factors that will determine scoping efforts include:

1. Is this a migration or upgrade from one version of environment to a newer one or is it a transition to a completely different environment?
2. Is this effort going to consist of purely traditional OCM support (messaging and communications mostly), is there a knowledge campaign already in place or have communications to the users already started?
3. Will the OCM/Migration Support team be required to reach out to users to help them prepare for the upcoming change or work with any data analysis in support of the effort?
4. Will the OCM/Migration Support team be required to support the users during or after the change in a supplemental role to the client's service desk?
5. What level of data analysis and dynamic scheduling integrated with workflow management is needed to support this project?

• On the customer side we typically engage with project sponsors, representatives from the business, and individuals responsible for serving as liaisons to the business from IT as well as those responsible for messaging and communications.  Sometimes we also work with representatives from the Service Desk.  The OCM/Migration Support effort is tightly integrated with the technical delivery side and is designed to support their efforts.  It is our goal to offload as much of the effort outside of their technical focus as we can to help them succeed.

• MSG: Is this delivered by your team only or can we use some of our staff/customer’s staff?
• TC: Larger scale initiatives may require significant resources if a team is being assembled to work with the users to prepare them for the change or support them afterwards.  Sometimes resources like business analysts are needed to help map or translate environments or assist with the final architecture.  These larger teams can certainly be hybrid combinations of More Solutions Group and our partners.

Please contact Managing Partner, Wally Musto (wally@deservesmore.com), for more information.