Change management plays a crucial role in successfully implementing a stakeholder management system by guiding people through organizational change. By understanding stakeholders' needs and addressing potential resistance, change management ensures smoother adoption and sustained support.
Joining Jambo for this blog is Jan Pezarro from Q4 Consults. Q4 Consults focus on strategic planning, communications, engagement, and corporate development.
As Jan says, "this might seem like a little bit of an unusual mix until you consider that communications and engagement and corporate development are crucial to the implementation of any strategic plan."
We asked Jan to join our expert blog series to provide our readers with insight into how engagement teams can apply change management best practices to improve stakeholder management system implementations. Jan's change management expertise lies mainly in the transportation industry, including railways, transit, ports, airports - just about anything that involves the movement of people and goods. She has most recently guided a change management process within the health sector. "When it comes to change management, very different industries experience the same issues," says Jan.
What is change management?
In its simplest form, change management is a systematic approach that supports the implementation of new initiatives by engaging all stakeholders affected by the change. It proposes a range of strategies and tactics to drive adoption of the desired change. It considers policy, equipment, software, resources, and people.
Why is change management important for engagement teams?
People working in the engagement space often consider stakeholders to be the individuals impacted by a project and with whom they are engaging or consulting. For this blog, we are considering internal stakeholders - the team members who the new process and technology will directly impact. Like external stakeholders, internal stakeholders can advance or delay a project's completion.
We know that moving from one approach to another will involve change, so you need to involve all team members in the implementation journey to help them feel confident using the new software. If a team member doesn't understand why they are using new software or isn't taught how to use all the excellent features, it is unlikely they will buy into the change.
If implemented effectively, a stakeholder management system can enable engagement teams to transform how they run their stakeholder engagement programs and improve their stakeholder relationships.
How do engagement teams get started with a change management plan?
I suggest beginning by asking these questions:
- Who are the stakeholders (both internal and external)?
- What are their needs?
- What are the objectives of the project?
- What are the key principles and key messages?
- Where are the gaps?
- How can we bridge those gaps?
You need to understand the answers to these questions so that when you roll out your software implementation, everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet. To do this, meet with executives, the engagement teams, external stakeholders (if appropriate and applicable), the software provider and whoever else makes sense. Use all their input to answer the questions and produce your change management plan.
In large-scale implementations, there's often so much attention paid to aspects like documentation and the implementation timeline that organizations forget about the people at the front line who will actually use the software and drive the change. Believe me, it's way easier to do your research and work with team members in advance than to launch your new software and fail due to a lack of adoption.
What change management tips do you have for engagement teams implementing a software management system?
For engagement teams communicating with many stakeholders or running consultation activities that need to be reported on, not using software to organize and manage this information is a significant risk.
A stakeholder relationship management software is a place for teams to store stakeholder profiles, log engagement information and communications with stakeholders, manage project tasks, run reports, etc.
I suggest helping people understand both the benefits of the software and the risks if it isn't implemented. Develop key messages that explain these risks and use them often. It can be helpful to designate a software implementation champion to help convey these messages.
"Change management is a systematic approach where we must assess the readiness of each team member on a couple of metrics to embrace and succeed with the new process or technology."
A change management tool you can use during the implementation phase is a readiness assessment. A readiness assessment identifies potential challenges that may arise when implementing the new software within the current organizational context. It helps by getting under the hood to understand how people feel and their attitudes towards the change. You can find out things like:
- Do they understand the need for the new software?
- Do they have previous experiences with software implementations (good and bad)?
- How do they feel about learning the new software? Are there any concerns?
- Do they have time to learn the new software? If they don't, how can you help free up their time?
- Do they understand the risks of not implementing or using the software?
Only when you tease out those individual aspects and concerns can you understand the challenges you may face during the implementation. Once you have completed a readiness assessment, you can start to think about what needs to be done to address these challenges.
For example, if someone is concerned about learning to use the new software or worried they won't understand it, consider whether someone on your team is a software wiz and buddy them up for peer support or coaching. Peer support is judgment-free and can help teams move towards the successful adoption of new software.
See how Jambo makes stakeholder management software implementation easy with their 5-step process →
How can Q4 Consults help?
Every situation is a bit different, but there are some key principles. We personalize and design all our change management plans to be actionable. We don't compile a pretty plan that sits on your shelf, but a plan that tells you how to move into action.
We can draft the change management plan, help develop key messages, conduct readiness assessments, and create and facilitate workshops (whether with senior management, a larger supervisor group, or the entire engagement team).
We can prepare a wide range of communication materials. We also have various templates we can provide, as well as coaching or peer-coaching support.
In our change management plans, we will include a range of tactics for communication, training, reinforcement, and related activities to meet the organization's needs and address its challenges. Overall, we really prefer to teach our clients how to deliver these tactics themselves. Rather than us coming in and doing it all for you, we set up, support, and prepare teams to implement the change management plan themselves.
"Developing capacity within organizations and teams is a strong emphasis in our work. We want organizations to work with us, learn from us, and then be able to use these new skills now and into the future."
Any final change management advice?
Implementing a new stakeholder management software is exciting. The supervisor or team member who picked the software will often want everyone to start using it right away. Although it's essential to have a champion for your software, if the wider team still struggles to understand the rationale for the implementation, you will encounter issues. Do the work upfront to develop key implementation messages, and always remember you're dealing with different human beings who need to adapt in various ways. Whether you complete a full change management plan or not, make sure change management best practices are included in your process in some way.
