Rocket Science! - Yes or No?

Introduction

The topic of change management caused some controversy in the discussion of my last BPX related blog -> click here.I had stated that change management is not rocket science, what createda detailed written dialogue about this topic. Besides the fact thatchange management is very important for the success of most projects,the mentioned dialogue motivated me even more to write about thisinteresting topic.

1 - Importance of Change Management

System implementation projects cause many changes of different type andseverity. How you deal which each of these changes depends heavily onthe following factors:

• subjective severity,
  
• groups and number of people affected,
  
• risk of ignoring, and
  
• the time window the change appears until it impacts the organization.

Figure 1 elaborates this with an exemplary list from an real HRconversion project. The first column shows actual changes that occurredduring this project. Next column is your subjective assessment of theseverity of the change. Severity is a function of the change itself,the groups and size of group affected, as well as the risks to theproject. As I said, it is a subjective assessment and it helps you tocreate a priority of your change management activities. After all, therisk/cost ratio of one or several changes may not be high enough tojustify dealing with them. Some risks just need to be documented andaccepted, what is very different from overseeing or not dealing withthem at all.

Figure 1: Exemplary list of changes in SAP HR conversion project

Next column are risks. Please have a close look at the examples and youwill know why MOC is so important. The severity of the risks shown inthe table should make the importance of well planned and executedmanagement of change (MOC) clear. The project team needs to understandthat MOC is not secondary to completing the last few lines of code. Alack in MOC can make a project fail much more quickly and easily thanone or a few lacking software features. So never say you are too busywrapping up the project and rolling it out and you don’t have time towork on MOC now.

The timing column also helps you with prioritizing your activities overthe course of a project. Hence, it helps you to build your MOC projectplan. There are two elements to the timing: When do you discover achange and when will it impact the affected groups. If this window islarge, you have time to plan. If the window is small, you may have toimprovise and manage the change ad hoc. In general, most of the changeswill come into effect at go-live. Therefore, you want to make sure thatyou have the right targeted responses at or around this time.

The last column, responses, really leads us to the next section in thisblog. What are my tools to make sure none of the changes are affectingthe outcome of my project negatively?

2 – Responses OR Change Management Bag of Tricks

Change management is fun! - Most changes are unique and for each changeyou need to decide how best to respond to it. And not all changes makethings better. Sometimes a specific function may have been implementedin a more streamlined approach in the custom build legacy applicationthan in the standard software package; or at least it appears that way.Here is an example:

In the above HR conversion project, there was a perception that withSAP’s R/3 HR and its concept of info types, the usability of the systemand the user experience would suffer. Info types are pre-defined SAPscreens which house a set of related data like org assignments, addressor basic pay.

In the legacy application, however, the users were used to highlycustomized screens, combining many data element. Therefore, the userhad to go to a smaller number of screens and had many data elements insight. Hence, we had to deal with the notion that SAP was less flexibleand the final SAP HR solution may be inferior in look, feel andultimately functionality compared to the old tool.

When prototyping SAP HR we actually found that having these welldefined blocks of information, or info types, was a very powerfularchitecture. It was easy to combine them and string them intoprocesses. It was easy to model an employee file with differentvalidity periods for different type records (your address rarelychanges but you have a new salary every year … hopefully).

All these findings, summarized in some simple pictures (a cylindricalcontainer on a flip chart with rectangles showing the info types; wethen virtually picked them and strung HR processes together) we thenused during an all HR kick-off meeting at corporate as well as during akick-off with the international team. – The explanations were wellreceived and this was never brought up as an issue any longer. We hadturned a negative into a positive!
As you can see in this example, communication of the change – in thisexample early on during the kick-off meeting – is one importanttool/activity. Here is a more or less complete list of all the highlevel tools/activities:

• Communication
  
• Training and Involvement
  
• Support
  
• Strategy and Tools

Let’s look at each of these areas one at a time.

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/4084