Peer to Peer Magazine

48 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2017 FEATURES The Challenge of Change The first roadshow is to share your vision: why things are changing, what it means to the firm, and why they should be excited about it. It's not about details; it's about planting the seed. It's not about telling them how it's going to be; it's about leading them to an understanding and geing suggestions for development of your plan. As your project begins to take shape and you understand the project more clearly, it's time for the second roadshow. This one will focus on what's changing, what's not changing and what's in it for them. You'll want to share the schedule, plans for training and support, and introduce the people who have had input in the planning, including those from the user community. Get input in these sessions, but don't ask for suggestions if you can't take them. OCM for the Routine Change. The second type of OCM is for less drastic changes and for new soware that is not life-changing but still requires a lot of user communication to be successful. In one instance, a firm was implementing an upgrade of its contact management soware. Marketing and IT met with a few groups of secretaries and aorneys over the course of three weeks to find out how the product was currently being used, how well people knew about program functionality and how people might use new features. What they found was that people were not aware of all of the features currently available in the program. Based on this, it was decided to focus training not just on the new features, but also on reinforcing existing features. It was decided not to turn on some of the new features of the soware that might end up overwhelming users already challenged by the soware. This effort at change management saved IT and marketing a few headaches in the upgrade.. Ongoing OCM. Because you're in a continuous state of change, you should plan for continuous organizational change management. This not only helps with the "change" and "freezing" phases, it can also speed the "unfreezing" process. A good mechanism for routine OCM is the focus group. You will want multiple focus groups to cover the various constituencies you serve: one for secretaries that meets monthly, perhaps an aorney group that only meets twice a year, and ideally you would have groups with the same membership each time for continuity. Focus groups are awkward at the beginning. People might be afraid to speak out at all, or they might want to only tal about specifics –– that problem they had last week or why the help desk wasn't more helpful the last time they called. You might appoint a meeting facilitator to keep things rolling, allowing you to focus on the content and not the meeting process. Aer a few meetings, the group should be able to get past the specifics and become more comfortable discussing real issues and solutions. They'll have time between meetings to reflect on problems they encounter and improvements they see that are needed. Overcome the Challenge Over time, your OCM efforts can move the environment from "us vs. them" to "we." You're not only building a group of people to champion your next project, they will be building a champion in you to look aer their interests in improving firm technology. P2P IT has had a much longer lead time to adjust to the new technology and needs to be patient while others are going through change.

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