Whether that’s a customer experience overhaul, a complete CRM re-vamp or a brand new technology to bring those separate processes and systems on to one platform.

It’s a big investment for any business, and you want to ensure you get the ROI that was promised but a lot of things can get in the way of that. Employees don’t like change, if it’s not implemented in the right way, they can resist it and that’s where your project will fall flat. Worse, management might resist the change and that behaviour will echo through the company.

Our experts have seen it and we want to make sure it doesn’t happen on any of our projects so here are 6 ways your business can effectively manage change.

1. Identify the need - People are more likely to get behind something they see the reasoning in rather than just ‘another IT project’.
2. Create Change Champions -  An internal group of people in the business seen as leaders who will help drive the change. Think about the different departments, users and regions the change will affect and make sure to cover them all with your Change Champions
3. Determine a vision for change - What do you want to achieve and how will you achieve it? Focus on what you want to measure and make sure you have the tools to measure that data. For example the first response time to cases. What is the current measure and what is the target? This allows you to know if the change was effective or not...
   What should we achieve?
   How will we achieve it?
   How will we measure whether we achieved it?
4. Define Training - Think about communication first, how best can you reach your employees, what communication channels are you using internally already? Then training,  what documents and sessions will you need to create to make it as effective and simple as possible
   Don’t forget communication should be a two way street. Think about how you’ll gather feedback at each critical milestone from both your Change Champions and your end users. If it’s surveys, what app will you use to gather that? If it's a change council, put a date in the diary as soon as possible to ensure attendance.  
5. Plan, Plan, Plan - Build all of these activities into your project plan, each activity needs a time and resource allocation.
6. Look back - include in your project plan retrospectives to look back at your measures, compare the data, either realise change management or go back and evolve a process to get to that point. Repeat.

Finally, celebrate success!

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