BilkentMBA2010, Lessons Learned, Week 3

In managing the organizational change process it is very critical to overcome resistance to chance. A vision, strategy, goals and initiatives have to be carefully decided on. In addition, to overcome change resistance, employees should be told about how they will benefit from the new system and they should be involved in the change management system before finalizing decisions. The new system should be designed to address their needs and people should be empowered to take responsibility in change.

Organizational Change Management (OCM) involves the search for the answers of what, why, how, who, when and where questions for the ERP Implementation. Although people stuff (training, communications, security authorization, etc..) is misperceived as the soft stuff and technical issues (transporting old data into new system, blueprinting, etc..) as the hard stuff of the OCM, in practice this is not true. It is harder to confront people compared to technical issues and therefore the most important people initiatives should be identified and they should be made priority of OCM. Company culture (which includes values, beliefs and norms) also needs to be taken into consideration while managing the change. For instance, it can be especially harder to convince people on the benefits of change in a conservative/bureaucratic company culture, and issues must be handled with greater care in such an environment.

The 5 initiatives of OCM, which are interrelated and which support each other, can be addressed as following:

1. Training: core team training and management seminar should take place early in the project as an overview. End-user training which takes place later, is more time consuming, detailed and requires preliminary work such as training need analysis and course content development.

2. Communications: the determination of content/message, audience, communication channel (e.g. e-mail, lunch meeting, etc..), frequency, communicator, supporting material developer and messages and objectives constitute the elements of a communications plan. It is usually hard for the end-users to understand and embrace the system before go-live

3. Security/Role Development: the transactions that an end-user is authorized to complete should be determined.

4. Super-user Development: objectives, selection criteria (such as communication skills, being respectable, high knowledge level) should be determined and super-users must be trained. An open channel between super-users and end-users should be created. These super-users become the first contract of end-users in case of a problem. In return, they report key problems to technical analysts, who can ask the issues to business owners. The demand on super-users on the first months is very high and it is hard to estimate demand at that time.

5. Business Process Procedure: BPP should be documented to define the steps on how each transaction is used within the ERP system. This should be done before training process.

Risk Assessment: involves 5 steps which are; risk identification, impact identification, probability determination, risk index (result of impact) and mitigation of the risk (how to deal with risk).