In our combined 80+ years of executive experience, we have been involved in the formation
and execution of numerous change management plans, policies, and procedures.
We have been successful yet both acknowledge early failures that turned into valuable
learning experiences. Fortunately, our failures didn’t leave a mark and enabled us to
improve on our subsequent efforts leading to very successful careers.
Many of our clients ask us to share some of our change management lessons learned
and best practices from these experiences to better posture themselves for success and
minimize risk. We present them here to assist you as you develop your own change
management plans and processes:
Touhill’s Best Practices in Change Management
1. Communicate early and often: Nobody likes surprises. Every time you make
a change to an information system, an application, a web page, or data exchanges,
make sure you inform those affected by the change well before you make the change.22 Anticipate resistance and address fears by clearly articulating
why the change is needed and how it will affect the individual. Seek to involve
people in the change as opposed to imposing it upon them. Make sure you invest
in two-way communication throughout all stages of your change management
process.
2. Don’t rush to field crummy products: If you rush a change that produces crummy
results, you are rushing to fail. Crummy results erode confidence and make next
steps even more difficult. Carefully balance the demands for speedy delivery of
products with the demands for quality products as part of your risk management
process. Decisions regarding timelines and quality are management-level decisions.
Make sure that communication is strong between all parties to make certain
that risk is appropriately identified and decisions are made with the right information.
We’ve often found that adequate results are better than gold-plated results and
always better than crummy products that leave everyone disappointed.
3. Timing is everything: Have you ever had a system administrator take down a
service such as your email during the height of the workday because it was convenient
for the administrator? We hate that and won’t tolerate that in our organizations.
Changes need to be accomplished for the betterment of the organization
and its objectives. In his latest CIO position, the author was challenged by a fellow
managing director as to why the IT staff performed maintenance on a key
transportation system at 1:30 in the afternoon on Tuesdays. I told him we found
that well over 90% of the users of the system were in Afghanistan, and when we
asked them when would be a good time to do our maintenance so that it wouldn’t
interfere with their operations, they told us midnight leading into Wednesday was
best. Because Afghanistan is 10.5 hours ahead of us in time zones, we did our
maintenance at their convenience, during our afternoon. We recommend that
when you introduce changes, you do so at the convenience of those affected by
the changes. Not only is it common courtesy, but also it is good business.