The Change Agents

People, Processes, and Tools

Douglas Bruce, a business development consultant for Normandale Community College in Bloomington, consults with local businesses on technology-training issues. He recommends that companies think about change in terms of overarching systems: “Every organization has a people system, a tool system, and a process system. That’s it. You don’t have anything else . . . . And I think there is a growing sensitivity to the fact that these systems are interconnected.”

If corporate leaders think in those terms, Bruce suggests, they are less likely to dismiss “change resistors” as balking donkeys and more likely to address their concerns effectively. For example, sometimes a technology shift that is good for the overall company and its customers may actually hamper the performance of a group that handles a particular process; maybe they will have to enter the same information into a system twice or three times instead of once.

So, Bruce says, you have a situation like this: “The current process works great in my department. Things really hum. Now, from a silo perspective, you’re asking me to suboptimize what I do.” Why are you demanding such a thing? Is it in order to create a better result for the customer? Then, Bruce says, you’d better explain how the customer and the organization will benefit if you want employees in this group to use the new application as intended, instead of looking for ways to work around it.

What happens when people aren’t sold on the new system and do try to work around it? At minimum, the payoff for the software conversion “is way less than you anticipated for your investment,” says Suki Iyer, director of corporate marketing for Adayana, Inc., a Minneapolis-based workforce-development company. “Your total cost of ownership for the application goes up.”

Where Training Fits

Change management can be hard to do, but it’s easy to break down into general steps. Any number of “change models” can be found in management books, but Nordquist says they tend to include the same basic building blocks, which she outlines as follows:

{1} Define the change. What will happen and why?

{2} Assess the current climate. How are we doing things now?

{3} Identify a change approach. What will the transition look like? Who are the target audiences? What will be different for each of them, and how will the differences affect them?

{4} Generate sponsorship. Somebody high up in the organization needs to say, “This is the right direction for us, and I expect everyone to make it work.”

{5} Create a cultural fit. “We have a saying: ‘Culture always wins,’” Nordquist says. An organization’s culture amounts to “the way we do things around here—a collective pattern of behavior and unwritten rules.” The way the company has always conducted a process like invoicing may not matter to IT people, but it matters a lot to the people who handle invoicing. It may be well worth customizing a new software application to reflect an existing process, rather than changing the process to suit the application.