Change is the fuel that drives improvement, innovation, evolution and viability. Customers and markets are rapidly evolving and if businesses don’t follow suit, they may fall behind and deteriorate. However, even with this reality, change is often endorsed by the few advocating those changes and contested by the majority on the receiving end. For the recipients, change brings uncertainty, skepticism and anxiety which is why Organizational Change Management (OCM) strategies are required to disturb the natural resistance to change and sustain the benefits of new business strategies, enabling technologies and business transformation initiatives.
Such implementations of new systems move many people away from the status quo and outside their comfort zone. Most enterprise software implementations come across many cautious or resistant users and a smaller number of users who are adamantly opposed to change. This latter group may not be easily recognizable as they generally cast their opinion and spread doubts in private forums outside of management visibility. If uncontrolled, the hidden agendas and failure to embrace the needed change will pose significant challenges to the project with the likely result costing time and budget overruns.
Enabling Change Management in CRM is a series of steps such as implementing OCS expertise, chalking out a clear vision, assessing the readiness for change, designing the plan for communication, undergoing an impact analysis, delegating responsibility, improving the training framework, measuring value, making the end consumer the ultimate beneficiary and having post conversion intermediation measures in place.
To proactively head off this predictable occurrence, it is recommended to institute an OCM program to operate simultaneously with application deployment. The OCM program will analyze changes caused by the new solution, and in the analysis report, forecast the operational impacts, understand the cascading effects to users, prepare staff for change, and implement methods to minimize employee resistance to change while s maximizing the effectiveness of the change effort at the same time.