Tech Implementation Success – The Four Stages of Change Management: Ongoing Management and Optimization
Barry Dyer, SVP of Services at Operative, has helped many enterprises implement large-scale technology solutions. From his experience, success or failure often depends less on the software itself and more on how companies manage change before, during, and/or after the process.
Successful software implementations are highly dependent on strong leadership, coordinated rollout, communication and training, which is required across 4 stages of tech implementation. Buy-In, Implementation, Training, and Ongoing Management.
In Part 3 Barry explored:
- Why adoption determines whether technology delivers ROI.
- How communication and evangelism drive successful adoption.
- The importance of leadership in mandating and modeling change.
- Why continuous training sustains long-term success.
- How culture and vision turn new tools into transformation.
Dive into part 4!
PART FOUR – ONGOING MANAGEMENT AND OPTIMIZATION
This final stage of an implementation doesn’t have an end date. It’s an ongoing job to ensure that employees and technology work together to evolve the company successfully. The implementation is a snapshot in time, based on a version of the company and the software that will start to evolve as soon as deployment is complete. This is something that needs to be planned for, not surprised by. Change is inevitable and constant: companies innovate with new product enhancements, companies change processes and org structures, markets shift, creating new opportunities and headwinds that need to be addressed.
A healthy implementation is just the beginning of a long term relationship. And as anyone in a long term relationship knows, it can take work to keep things running smoothly.
Early Days – Driving Continued Adoption and Improvement
A few training sessions is never enough to get employees to adopt new software. Even if old software is turned off, many employees will take more time and processes to wholly embrace the new platform.
The natural avoidance of learning a new system is a widespread issue in business, with an estimate of 50% of software installed at companies going unused by employees.
The solution is to create a culture that embraces learning and adoption of better systems and processes. This starts from the top down and must be pervasive across the organization.
While the IT team is responsible for the technical implementation, the executive team and management must carry the ball forward with ongoing training and cultural reinforcement. This requires additional mandates as well as additional training. For example, if all salespeople are required to build proposals in the system in order for them to count towards their goals, they will be much more motivated to learn the system. If all customer reports must be pulled from the system or employees risk getting blowback from their manager, they will build out reporting in the new system.
One way to ensure healthy adoption is to start with a small benchmark and build against them. Managers shouldn’t assume everyone absorbed all of the information they needed in the training. Ideally users of the software have access to help and additional training – even a library of how-to videos. A stream of content such as internal how-to newsletters and added training sessions, brown bag lunches where team members share something they learned, all add up to creating a culture of learning and improvement.
Another positive approach is to provide signs of success early and often. Managers can highlight team members who are doing an especially good job using the new software and provide them with new responsibilities as an expert user. At town halls, executives can provide metrics-driven proof that the new software is working, for example by saving people time, reducing errors or increasing deal velocity or even revenue (which might not be as measurable in the early days.)
Mutual Work – Product and Process Improvements
Media companies have advertising technology in place for many years, if not decades. Implementation is just one phase of a much longer process of maximizing value from software investments. To get the most ROI from a software engagement both IT and management must be involved in an ongoing relationship with their vendor partner.
Here are different strategies that ensure high long term ROI from a software investment:
- Create a process for delivering regular feedback: Stakeholders should have regular meetings with their vendor partner including a QBR and ideally a CAB. Stakeholders should collect use cases and data about software use and collaborate on improvements either in terms of how to optimize use of the current system and requests for new features and product improvements.
- Embrace the core offering: As the relationship strengthens, media companies can start to ask for custom builds to solve specific needs. Building highly customized solutions to fit a very unique process can be costly, time consuming and ultimately doomed to fail. A vendor needs to build a product that can work across a variety of use cases, and so customers should do what they can to take advantage of the robust core product rather than focus on a highly custom process built on software that won’t be maintained with the same speed or investment as the core product.
- Build for the future: Technology is constantly changing, as are company goals and needs. Creating a software ecosystem that is agile, modular and flexible is the best insurance that investments will provide long term payoff. This means every new change, such as an integration or connection to a new data set, should be designed for future change. Using cloud software and AI, centralizing and unifying data, and streamlining superfluous steps can all help a company stay nimble.
- Be open to learning: Vendors see many use cases across their client base and can share best practices that can deliver millions in savings or increased growth. Asking for feedback gives media companies an understanding of how the software can be used to its maximum potential.
After decades of linear dominance, many media companies are in the middle of major changes to capture audiences on streaming and digital. Building out the next generation technology while continuing to support the linear business requires a true partnership with vendor partners. This technology is what the media business will run on for years and even decades to come.
Operative has implemented technology with the largest media companies across linear, digital and streaming, and understands the components required to ensure that software delivers value. The most successful implementations are true partnerships, including change management, strong leadership and a willingness to embrace innovation and improvement over time.