Read others’ posts and respond in 250-300 words to at least one of your course colleagues. Why do you agree or disagree with their post? What in your experience or research supports your assertions?
This is the post you are responding to….
Read others’ posts and respond in 250-300 words to at least one of your course colleagues. Why do you agree or disagree with their post? What in your experience or research supports your assertions?
We started by creating an organizational change plan which entailed multiple communication strategies and documented areas where we anticipated resistance and rates those areas from high to low. Areas were we felt resistence would be extermely high, we notified leadership teams to gain support and focused on gaining “champions” by building relationships with key individuals. Our relationship building consisted of open communication regarding the design and features of the system, requesting their feedback and input so they were became part of the development effort themselves. This process required a lot of compromise, and in some cases additional customiztions to ensure the system was flexible enough to allow the users to make changes to customize functions dynamically depending on their department or area of operations. No plans were hidden, and all were discussed openly, including process gaps that were seen during observation periods which were conducted to help learn the departments processes. By showing the individuals how we could make their process simpler and more streamlined with specific features in the new system, and by incorporating their feedback to address concerns we were able to change their attitudes in our objectives and build strong working relationships.
These champions then became our spokespeople to help advertise and market the importance and functionality of the system. They would include myself and my team in their department meetings to introduce the system and provide question/answer to expand the relationships with each of the champion’s teams. Having built the relationships with the champions, the champions helped to start breaking down the walls of distrust by personally introducing myself and my team, essentially bringing use into the foldand vouching for us. We then had to continue building the relationship by delivering on promises, bringing the same open/honest communication to the team, and incorporating feedback as we could to help the champions team gain buy-in into the new system as well. We also had to be very careful to not create any reason for the champion’s team to lose faith and trust in the champion.
When it was close to the time to implement the system, my team ensured that communication was constant with each of the teams, extended testing period to the teams for them to experience the system first hand and allow them to conduct testing which provided another level of feedback, and conducted multiple levels of end-user training. Luckily all of the work paid off, and our adoption rate was very high, and we were able to start turning off old systems quickly and meet planned deadlines.
