IMA's Implementing Organizational Changes at Speed Blog

Transformational change can be found across almost every organization in just about every industry. But, truth be told there may not be an industry undergoing more significant and rapid change than Healthcare.  In addition to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the Healthcare industry is experiencing a myriad of other changes.  The implementation of cross-functional patient care models, cost-efficiency driven operational changes, new facilities, and ongoing compliance requirements are just the tip of the iceberg. 

Here’s the reality: Many project teams are focused solely on time and budget and the technical project milestones. All good, but that just will get the team to “installation!” The team is off and running, but if the end-goal is, as it should be, business realization (also known as value realization, ROI, or benefit realization) the project is sure to fall short in the end in achieving sustained change and long-term business results.

Consider for a moment the phases of transformational change projects. Transformation typically begins with a core team that develops a vision of the future state. Over time, the team may engage others as it moves through the design/development/testing phases—all leading to the “go-live” or “cut-over” date.  These steps represent the installation phase of your program. 

Transitioning to a Shared Services model is one of the most common transformational changes we see in our Change Management Consulting work. The rationale for this type of enterprise-wide change is clear-- why support redundant services such as IT, Human Resources, Financial and/or Legal, in each organizational silo when there can be one corporate-wide resource that is shared? But… the question is… are organizations achieving true benefit realization from their Shared Services implementations? 

In our recent blog article, “Why Do Change Projects Fail? How Can You Prevent Your Project from Becoming a Statistic?” we quoted a relatively well-repeated figure that up to 70% of all major change initiatives fail. We seem to have hit a nerve within the Change Management industry. A debate was started about the definition of failure and why, if this fact was true 20 years ago, is it still applicable today? 

In today’s business world, organizations are constantly trying to get ahead by using the most advanced and up-to-date technology. Billions of dollars a year are being spent on new CRM’s, ERP’s and other technological advances. But are these companies truly getting their money’s worth?

Lately in our Change Management Consulting work, we are seeing a lot of organizations who are strategically hoping to become customer-centric-- or for those of our clients in the health care industry, patient-centric. Simply put, these organizations are making changes to their inherent culture to make their primary focus the customer they are serving rather than the product they are trying to sell.

Making certain you have the appropriate number of Change Agents, with the desirable skills, in the proper places is a critical component of organizational change management and achieving value realization for your project. In other words, creating a Change Agent Network is crucial for implementation success.  

How does a change management methodology help ensure value realization for technology regarding a software/technology upgrades?  On a recent call with a prospective client, we heard an all too familiar scenario.  Here’s how the conversation went: 

One of the key principles of our change management model is that implementation takes place at the local level.  So if your Change Management Methodology doesn't provide tools for identifying the right people for the role of Change Agents, you are going to miss a critical element of successful change.