Change management tools: Technologies to drive the future of your organization

Did you know that 75% of organizations will likely increase their major change initiatives in the next three years? So what are the best change management tools to assist you with this?

Businesses are constantly dealing with new challenges, be it ever-evolving technologies or budding competitors. So, more organizations than ever before are making innovative changes to avoid stagnation or the risk of failure.

“The key to change is to start doing new things. If we continue to do the same things today as we were doing yesterday, our future will not be different from the present.” Lalit Jagitiani, Author of When Change Happens.

Change management is a structured approach to help individuals and teams implement a change within the organization. For instance, coming up with a strategy to change a business process or making a cultural transformation that impacts the organization significantly is part of change management. Change management is the key to achieving positive and long-lasting results.

Identifying the right tools helps make this transition smooth for employees and customers. Before diving into the change management process, let’s understand what change management tools are and how to use them effectively.

What is a change management tool?

A change management tool is an application that can be used to address the challenges that arise during significant enterprise transformations. It could be a model, an app, or a platform that helps change management teams prepare, implement, and institutionalize the change.

Whether you want to collect customer feedback regarding a recently implemented change or keep a tab on the effectiveness of a new business process, change management tools help you with all this and much more.

These tools structure the overall process of making a change, which can otherwise be painful and chaotic. For instance, when making a complex change in a business process, change management software help the managers assign tasks to their team, track their progress, and keep everyone updated on the tasks at hand through automated alerts.

How do these tools assist in the change management process?

The change management process involves steps that move a change from the starting point (A) to a functional endpoint (B). Here are the steps involved in the process:

Step 1: Determine the need for change

When making significant changes, the first step is to identify the type of change that your organization requires. There are three types of changes, and each requires a different approach.

The developmental change focuses on changing the organization’s existing aspects and generally on improving processes or skills. For instance, improving the existing billing or your payroll procedures is a part of developmental change.

Transitional change is more radical and focuses on replacing the existing processes with new and efficient ones. This type of change is more uncomfortable and challenging to implement and adopt. Developing new products and implementing new technologies are examples of transitional changes.

Transformational change involves reshaping your business strategy and processes and often causes a shift in work culture. Managing transformational organizational changes requires more effort, as this type of change results in fear and insecurity among employees.

Once you have identified the type of change, you can conduct a need assessment to get a grip on what’s changing. For instance, if you are going through a transitional change such as a merger, you may require a new combined team, a new work location, a new leader, and even new software. Next, you need to perceive how people in the organization would react to the change and what needs to be done to get all the stakeholders on board for the change project.

The ADKAR model focuses on the people’s side of change and lists the five steps an individual must take to prepare for change. These five steps are:

1. Awareness regarding the need for change
2. Desire to be a part of the change process
3. Knowledge of how to bring about the change
4. Ability to implement the required skills and behaviors
5. Reinforcement to institutionalize the change

This model helps create the goals for change and the possible outcomes. It helps change management teams direct their efforts on bringing individual change that will further drive organizational change.

OnScreen Guidance is a digital adoption platform that is useful at this stage. It enables users embarking on a change to bring about process harmonization. This is achieved by creating contextual and step-by-step guides for business processes using your company’s best practices and standard operating procedures.

If your organization is considering a change that involves SAP implementation or an upgrade to S/4HANA, OnScreen Guidance offers more than 500 templates based on fit-to-standard best practices.

Step 2: Plan for change

A change management plan is a roadmap that outlines and defines the actionable steps your organization has to take to implement the change management process.

For an effective change management plan, you need to consider the following elements:

Roles and responsibilities: The core roles in change management include the change practitioners, project leaders, people managers, sponsors, and employees who are impacted by the change. Stakeholder analysis helps you identify these key individuals who have a stake in your project and categorize them according to occupation, income, and geography.

It also enables you to target your change effort toward each stakeholder to address their pain points and behavior toward change.

It is crucial to decide who will submit and approve change requests. Large organizations usually have a change control board that includes people receiving the change requests and those who authorize or veto them.

Change process: A change process needs a clearly defined process for submitting, evaluating, approving, and managing change requests.

Communication strategy: You need to develop a strategy that includes the key messages and communication channels employed to get all the stakeholders on board. It also contains the timeline for communicating the messages incrementally.

Training: You need to have a training plan for employees that addresses the knowledge requirements and the skills required by the employees during and after the change process.

Resistance management: Every project has risks, and in the case of a change management project, the most significant risk is resistance from the stakeholders who must adapt to the changes.

As people are used to working on specific processes over some time, it is natural to expect resistance when they must adopt something new. So, it would help if you incorporated strategies in your plan to prepare you for any opposition.

OnScreen Guidance helps you create contextual step-by-step guides in platforms such as SAP, SuccessFactors, and Salesforce. These provide actionable guidance to users to reduce resistance to change, increase adoption, and streamline processes.

Step 3: Implement the change

Now that you have a plan ready, it is time to follow the list of actionable tasks to implement the change.

Whether the change involves building a new company culture, improving a business process, or revamping the organization’s structure, the plan should be followed to the letter to achieve the desired outcomes.

Motivating the employees and providing them with more clarity about the vision for change helps them move in the right direction. It is also important to brainstorm the possible challenges and how they can be mitigated.

At this stage, you also need software that accelerates and streamlines the documentation processes, and this is where a tool such as OnScreen Guidance comes in handy.

Step 4: Integrate changes within the organization

To ensure that this change is not temporary, the change managers need to make constant efforts so that the shift occupies a solid place in the organization. All leaders need to embrace this change so they can motivate employees to make the change stick.

Ensure that you talk about the positives of change at every opportunity. When hiring new staff, include the success stories and new ideas, so they are aware of the change right at the beginning.

Reward the people whose efforts were crucial in bringing about change.

For change leaders embarking on software implementation, OnScreen Guidance announcements can be used as a tool to inform the stakeholders about new features or changes in the application. As the messages are delivered directly in the system or application, this feature is helpful in contextual communication that can be used to inform or motivate stakeholders.

Step 5: Evaluate results for continuous success

Once the change has been implemented and integrated, it is time to review the results for essential learnings. These insights can be helpful when working on new change management projects.

If the project has succeeded, the change manager needs to consider where it can be replicated. On the other hand, if the goals were not met, analyze what went wrong and make sure that the same mistakes aren’t repeated.

OnScreen Guidance analytics has features such as process efficiency tracking, usage stats, and a user productivity dashboard that enable you to measure the effectiveness of the change project.

Tools that assist in the different stages of change management

Here is a list of tools that help you adapt to new changes in the organization seamlessly:

• OnScreen Guidance is a digital adoption platform that specifically accelerates and strengthens user adoption. It is also designed to plan, implement, and measure significant organizational changes.
• The Change Compass helps organizations visualize the impact of the proposed plan on all stakeholders, including employees, customers, and partners.
• Asana is an online project management system that helps you track and manage your change project. It enables you to organize your project, communicate with your team, and keep them updated on the latest changes.
• JIRA is a robust tool for issue tracking as it helps the team members submit change requests by creating a ticket. The concerned authority can approve these tickets within the system.
• The Change Shop is a change management software that provides crucial insights based on surveys and helps gauge employee engagement and perception of the change.

How to choose the right change management tools

Ask yourself the following questions before investing in a change management tool for your organization:

• Does this product help me achieve the goals?
• Does it suit the budget?
• What are the key benefits of the software?
• Is this product compatible with the existing software in the organization?
• What does the company offer in terms of support?
• What are the platforms that I can use this software on?

The answers to these questions will give you clarity on the type of tool that your organization requires.

What are the benefits of using change management tools?

Whether your organization is facing challenges related to growth or a shift in laws and regulations, change management software can benefit immensely. Here are a few key benefits of using these tools:

• An effective change management process bridges the gap between people, processes, and technology. It provides the necessary guidance to follow processes and faster documentation to encourage user adoption.
• These tools help you align the resources and manage the diverse costs related to the project.
• Change management software helps the team build the necessary skills by sharing contextual guides that enable users to follow the process and eliminate the need for training.
• They enable you to stay updated on the goals, measure the results, and mitigate the risks through dashboards that provide data that is easy to interpret (in the form of charts and reports).
• Overall, a good tool helps speed up the change process by helping you plan, map, manage, track, and report organizational changes.

Final thoughts

Change management tools help the organization adopt a change successfully. OnScreen Guidance is a digital adoption platform that helps you speed up your change management efforts by reducing the training and support needs. It provides real-time information by providing in-application help to users and streamlining processes and workflows. It helps develop contextual guides to help employees navigate a business process easily. Request a demo to learn more.