The Inconvenient Truths About Organizational Change Management

Why OCM is Critical to the Success of Your EPM Transformation.

According to analysts and customer feedback, EPM projects, as a subset of Analytics projects, are among the most challenging to achieve positive business value results. The reasons are many, including not having appropriate expectations laid out in a business plan, ill-advised technical designs, poor technical execution, not having internal skills to properly manage the solution, and not including a beneficial process change while implementing the technology.

This blog will focus on successful strategies to prepare an organization to make the most of a process and/or technology change. This important, but often overlooked, success driver for any project can make a positive impact in terms of user adoption, process effectiveness, lower TCO, and ultimately superior ROI.

Organizational Change Management – What is it?

Simply, Organizational Change Management is a structured approach for ensuring that changes are smoothly and successfully implemented to achieve lasting benefits within an organization.

Organizational Change Management ensures individuals, teams, and organizations make an efficient transition to the desired future state as a result of new business processes, new technology, changes in organizational structure, or cultural changes within the enterprise.

The Case for OCM

• 70% of organizations suffered one failed project in past 12 months.*
• The biggest barriers to project success are people factors: 58% mindsets, 48% culture, 32% lack of senior management support. *KPMG, IBM 2010
• Gartner reports OCM accounts for upwards of 17% of project success, and recommends allocating 15% of project budget to OCM.

Myths about OCM

• OCM is just another name for training.
• OCM is effective as an add-on service that can be addressed sometime later in the project.
• OCM is a nice to have, but not critical to project success.

The Truths about OCM

• OCM is a framework and methodology to manage resistance, increase adoption, and achieve ROI.
• Change Management is about meeting financial goals that are directly tied to employee speed of adoption.
• The biggest barriers to project success are people factors.
• Leadership and Change Management are cited most often as the top enablers for achieving value.
• Companies with a Change Management approach have 2.5x greater financial returns.*Tower & Watson

Gartner 2015 on Organizational Change Management

Project Management Leaders recognize that the primary value of projects goes beyond delivering on-time and on-budget, but rather ensures the expected business outcomes and realized value.  Further, they are increasingly aware that the biggest changes from project activities are actually people-oriented, and that they influence culture and mindsets across the enterprise.

Keys to a Successful EPM Project

1. Make Change Management a critical part of the EPM Transformation; assess the change impact as early as possible in the EPM project lifecycle.
2. Integrate OCM Methodology into Project Management Methodology to ensure the people impact is planned from project start and addressed at each phase.
3. Ensure OCM is not a single event; an ongoing reinforcement plan ensures ongoing adoption.
4. Expanded knowledge transfer and user involvement leads to higher success rates.

To learn more about incorporating an OCM Methodology into your EPM Transformation projects, please contact Connie Folk, Global Director PMO, Column5 Consulting.

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