The Digitization of OCM
As a change practitioner, my career has centered around helping companies make improvements to the systems and tools they use to perform work. Organizations continue to take advantage of rapidly evolving technology capabilities to streamline, automate and simplify the management of data used to run their business. Most recently this has labeled as “Digital Transformation.”
Perhaps one of the most frustrating aspects of these initiatives was watching the rapid evolution of technology used in our client organizations while the most evolved tools I had at my fingertips were a collection of disconnected Word and Excel templates that required a significant amount of effort to maintain. The manual effort required to keep information up to date forced a disproportionate amount of time to be allocated to managing the data instead of using the insights the data provided to intervene and ensure adoption.
What’s the Solution?
Fortunately, new tools and platforms are now available that can help avoid this frustration by streamlining the execution of change management activities. . Commercially available tools and internally developed platforms harness the power of modern digital transformation to more easily gather, manage, analyze and report upon data that is crucial to change management.
Who Benefits from Digitized OCM?
Modernizing the execution of transformation has deep impacts across an organization. Those that receive, execute, manage or sponsor changes all can benefit!
Change practitioners are the obvious winners here. Time spent pouring over Excel spreadsheets, chasing information and reacting to incorrect data are gone thanks to systems that automate and manage the information far more effectively. Tasks like analyzing the impacts of several projects on an organization can now be done with a few clicks of the mouse! This insight helps to identify where the focus needs to be to help employees avoid change fatigue.
Project leaders are provided vastly improved perspectives into the effectiveness of change efforts while project managers benefit through improved visibility to the execution of the change effort. Armed with this information they can more effectively manage resources and activities across an organization and know that transformation will be executed consistently.
The ultimate winners here are those on the receiving end of change! When an organization builds its transformation muscles, the organization becomes change capable, not frozen or afraid of change. All changes, big or small, have a flow and rhythm that only help to drive adoption and ease resistance.
How do you do this?
One of the easiest ways to accomplish digitizing change management is taking advantage of the power behind the Microsoft Office 365 platform. At Change 4 Growth, we took significant actions to modernize our tools and templates by connecting the data within Office, building an end-to-end platform that mirrors our change management methodology, and built custom applications, reporting capabilities and automation using Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps. The up-front work to elevate and digitize our toolset has resulted in a significant improvement in our ability to consistently deliver our work for our clients.
The nice thing is that our platform is extremely flexible; if a client has a preferred tool or template, we can easily bring it into ATLAS™ and connect the data seamlessly. That is not the case, however, with other commercially available tools.
To learn more about ATLAS™ by C4G, join me for our free webinar on Thursday, October 15, 2020! Click here to register!
About the Author
Mark Deans is the Vice President of Professional Services at Change 4 Growth. As VP, Mark oversees the delivery of C4G’s client engagements, including Organizational Change Management, Learning/eLearning, Leadership Development, Culture and Employee Engagement, and Project Delivery. Mark is also the Product Owner of C4G’s digital OCM platform, ATLAS™ by C4G.
