Name: Beyond Technology: Lessons from Successful ERP Transformations
Uploaded: 2025-05-06T03:31:04.627Z
Duration: 1 h 12 min 24 s
Description: Beyond Technology: Lessons from Successful ERP Transformations

Transcript for "Beyond Technology: Lessons from Successful ERP Transformations": Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to today's Prosci webinar. Thank you for joining us wherever you might be in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, or any other part of the world. My name is Deepali, and along with my colleagues, Stephanie and Andre, we'll be the producers for today's webinar. We are excited to be spending the next hour with you all and two of Prosci's change advisers to talk about a topic that is top of the mind for a lot of organizations today, ERP and large scale digital transformation. We have a lot of great content packed into the next hour. Before we get started, I wanted to walk you through a couple of familiar housekeeping items just to make sure we can have the best webinar experience possible here on our platform. To get started, I'll direct your attention to the right hand side of your screen. If you can already see the chat window, it's been going on. People have been sharing where they're calling in from, and it's great to see the global spread of change practitioners who are joining us today. So thank you again for making the time out of your busy schedules to be with us here today for the next hour. In addition to the chat, you're going to see two other options here. We have, messages and Q and A. So messages is your way to connect with us one on one if you needed support. That will directly go to us backstage, and, you can then, use that function to get our attention if you needed technical support. We also have, q and a on today's webinar. So at the end of the webinar, we have about, ten minutes left for questions. While the presentation, feel free to click into the q and a window and ask your questions. We'll be able to sift through those in the back stage, and our speakers, David and Kathleen will be looking for those great questions at the end of the session. If you have a question about ERP launch digital transformations, be sure to check that in. We won't be able to address hyper specific, questions as, we know everyone has a unique situation, but we'll be looking at things that are more wide scale and can apply to many people on the call today. We're expecting a large audience, and I can already see a number of people joining us. So thank you very much for joining and participating today. Finally, we'll be recording today's session. After the broadcast, the recording will be processed, and you will get an email from Goldcast so remember to look out of that. And Prosci also be sending you an email with, additional resources later this week. So keep a keep an eye on your inbox for that as well. So we are about, three minutes in, and I can see we have some questions. There are no handouts today, no slides. We're just here talking to our speakers so you can relax and fully immerse yourself in the presentation. Alright. So, I will hand over to our speakers, and we are joined today by David Lee and Kathleen Nash, two of Prosci team advisers, and they are here to share with us the lessons learned from successful enterprise resource planning transformations. Alright. Over to you, David and Kathleen. Okay. I can't see slides being shared yet. Are you gonna is that is everybody being here? I will do that now. Yeah. Okay. Apologies, everybody. We're on a new platform, so we're just learning. This is our first crack at this one. Yeah. We'll start. So while you get going, digital transformation is a complex change, but it can be achieved. So we're good change principles. I think I'm on the next one there. At Prosci, we help organizations succeed at these complex initiatives by building organizational change readiness, by helping organizations establish proper ecosystems, processes, roles, knowledge, capabilities, and activating those roles through individual behavior changes via our AGCAR model, sponsor roles, support, manager, acquired roles, etcetera. You'll be hearing all about those throughout the program. We have a packed agenda for you today, and we hope that you'll get some information to take back and apply to your company and your situation. From an agenda perspective, we're gonna start off with the true cost of ERP change. Of course, ERP change is costly, just the installation of it. Organizations are investing millions and millions to leverage these integrated technologies and improve efficiencies in their organization, but they often underestimate or even ignore the people side of the implementation and that can actually increase the cost. We'll look at success factors. We'll look at key elements beyond technology that help protect ERP success. We'll look at building readiness under pressure. How to prepare your organizations when a time is limited. Of course, we often get called into the implementation late. So what are some things we can do when that happens? We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about role activation and hierarchy, who do engage with first and why it matters. If you've been through our three day certification, you have heard us say the change practitioners are like directors of a play. Change management is a team effort, so we look at the key roles needed to activate and to yield a higher return and then building our change ecosystems, creating the network of support needed for adoption even to consider how to build leverage that network to support adoption. And then finally, we'll look at early warning systems. The signs that your ERP project might be at risk. Then we'll end with some key early warning signs to help you mitigate people's side of success. But first, let's introduce ourselves. So hi, everybody, and welcome. It's great to see so many of you joining us today. It's such an important conversation because change management is essential element of successful ERP implementations. I'm David Lee, I am managing director and executive instructor for Prosci based in Singapore. I started my career in the travel industry a few centuries ago. I worked at a company called Sabre, which is the technology backbone of the travel industry in many ways. And among its offering, Sabre powered the operating systems for major travel companies like American Express. And one of my early roles was leading change management in one of their key divisions. And then later in my career, I experienced ERP implementation myself from multiple angles. First, as an end user and eventually as the manager director and head of change management practice line for consulting firm that actually specialized in technology rolled out including Oracle and SAP implementations. So having seen these projects from both sides, I can tell you that without a solid focus on change management, they can be miserable. But when there is a good focus on the people side, they can be quite successful. I'm happy to be joined today by my co presenter who I'll ask to introduce herself. Thanks, David. So, Kathleen Nash here. I have, been with Prosci Australia & New Zealand for a couple of years now. And prior to that, my, experience with change was helping organizations, particularly around digital transformations in federal and, local government here in Australia. So, lots of lots of experience in seeing the good, the bad, and the the lessons that make things, a a win. Today, we're gonna share with you some, as David's already said, some practical tips, some real life examples of what successful adoption looks like, and how to help teams actually adopt the systems, not just survive, go live. But before we do that, we'd love to get a sense of who's in the room with us today. So there's a poll in, which you're in the right hand pane in the same area where the chat and the q and a is. If you could, jump in there and click the option that best fits you. So ERP transformations, as we know, sort of, touch so many different roles and and bring together a wide range of people. So we've got the it's good to see that we've got some project managers and that that that you're juggling those timelines, budgets, and thousands of moving parts for these sorts of things. Essentially, you're the glue that's holding, the whole thing together. And then, welcome to any of the, leaders and the executives on the call. It's really great to see that you're engaging hopefully early in your, ERP journey. HR and training folks in the room, we know we know how much communication and and what matters and and the key role that you guys play in that. And then change managers, making sure that people don't get left behind in these in these, transformations. So and for those that's who selected maybe none of the above, ERPs are never just one person's job. So whatever role you're is your your perspective in this this conversation today is essential. Yeah. I think we've come through the agenda. So let's jump to the next thing. Since our founding in 1994, Prosci has been the leader in change management by combining our deep understanding of people with a proven methodology within the creation of ACR model ACR model. We have an unprecedented understanding of how to go through change. On the next slide, our our programs, advisory solutions, our body of knowledge are all trusted by change experts all around the world. Fortune 100 companies and organizations, from public service to commercial. Our focus on research based insights and innovations ensures that our programs, digital resources, software advisors are all pushing the industry to be more agile, more effective, and more sustainable. Organizations worldwide partner with us for research backed enterprise solutions that drive change success. Our com our combination of offerings from role based training to advisory services to licensing and e learning tools to our research packet help, organizations come stronger through a holistic approach to change. We are focused exclusively on change management. And since 1998, we've conducted 12 benchmarking studies to uncover best practices in the field of change management. And 02/2023, over 2,600 participants from organizations all over the world contributed to this study. Now when we do these studies, we take a longitudinal approach, which means we examine the same variables each time, such as sponsorship over long periods of time. And the goal is to confirm significance and it's avail and and just so you know, everything here that we're talking about is available through our hub suite. Some of the topics include the greatest contributors to success and change, the all important sponsor and the manager role included. We highlight some of these through our sesh we will highlight some of these through our sessions today. So let's talk about the true cost of ERP implementations. Kathleen? Thanks, David. So we're gonna jump into our first topic, the true cost of ERP change, and what happens if an organizations ignore the people side of change. When we think about ERP implementations, the focus is often on up front investments, so that your licensing, your integrations, your timelines, but those are just the visible costs. The true cost of an ERP change lies in what happens when people aren't ready or willing to adopt the new ways of working. So Prosci research gives us a good idea about the current state of change management in ERP implementations, and it's highlighting that a little over half, 55% of ERP projects meet or exceed their objectives. That 40% of them are getting there about a bit, not not all the way, and 4% of them are actually failing to meet those objectives. So they might have delivered the system, but people haven't actually made the changes to adopt the new way of working. So the main issues that tend to come out of this is that you've got, unrealistic expectations in terms of it's in in terms of people picking it up. There's poor change management that's contributed to those poor results, low user adoption, and a lack of alignment with business processes. So if if we take that, let's have a look at what might be those some of those misunderstandings that can derail your ERP plans. So I love this one. I've I've spent a lot of time doing, technology projects over my career, and when people go, oh, it's just a technology project. It doesn't need change management. We just we're just putting a system in. Any RP transformation is a significant undertaking for any organization. And, when we we downplay the importance of the people side of change and suggest that it is solely software and not about employees and how they will adapt and use the new system. This is just one of the ones. I'm sure you've all heard other things about, training will solve all our problems. So, it's just that they need to get in and start using it. I think it'll be fine once we go live. So let's have a look at when we've got the the pressure to to implement quickly, we when leading to rush decisions and and in addition change management practices. So if we look at where organizations lose value in their implementations as a result of these sorts of misconceptions, the data here is, research outside of that support what we've been discussing. So according to Gartner, over 90% of the executives using the ERP systems acknowledge they didn't do enough to manage organizational change. The implications are clear. Effective change management isn't a nice to have. Essentially, protecting your ERP investment. The top two drivers of value leakage in the filed implementations are low user adoption and misaligned business, needs, both which are driven by change management. Failure to define and execute on a change management plan at onset reduces the expected return, from the ARP, which in turn then drives strange relations internally within the organization and externally with, customers and suppliers, significantly reducing the return on investment. So what are the costs impact ERP success? When the people side of change is overlooked, organizations often face costs that go far beyond the project budget. Some of those are busy, others are hidden in day to day operations. So if we look at direct costs, we're looking at things like, a good technical task like data conversion and legacy systems integration become more expensive, when the provider ignored. You may see generic or ineffective training or even last minute training delivery. There's also the potential for productivity loss during the learning curve. The indirect cost, if we look on the right hand side there, the time spent managing resistance, managing that behavior where people aren't on board with the change, or potentially customer dissatisfaction. So you've you've had the service disruptions. And, you might even experience that higher turnover of skilled staff because they're not happy with with how the changes happened or and the impact it's having on them and their day to day work. Long term costs, as I said, that that's one of them, that employee turnover. So you might find an increase in employee turnover and the customer impact. We really look at this in the sense of and and, if you've been to any of our our training courses, you've probably seen this one before. It's not only the cost of the actual implementation, but the poor change management, can lead several of these rewords. So, rework when you have to redo those tasks or retrain in users, redesign. So having to, make more frequent changes, teams scrambling, address the unseen changes, and things like that. Reimplementation, I've I've seen this where they had to sort of go back and do it all again because they didn't write in the first time. And that's how they were financially staggering, and implementation include lost productivity, lack of trust, and change fatigue. So let me get you to, do another poll right now. What is the biggest risk, of poor ERP change management in your opinion? So if we're looking at the decreased productivity, so, employees may struggle with adapting the system. It might take them longer to to actually complete a task because they're not not, comfortable with it. If it's low system adoption, that sounds like a pretty critical risk if you're if you're setting your business objectives and outcomes on on, high levels of adoption of the system or it requires it for business delivery. A lack of effective change management leads to higher resistance, project delays, and cost overruns. So, as I said, an example that we've had here in Prosci, when somebody was working with a manufacturing organization, a low adoption occurred, and it occurred because when when, because the end users found workarounds in the system. They started hoarding materials, and in the end, that that resulted in shutting down, the plant for a full physical inventory, count that that, less than a month after go live. So that was a pretty huge impact of of, a a poor change management experience. So that experience is a powerful reminder of of how low user adoption can ripple across the organization. At the end of the day, the true cost of an ERP implementation isn't just measured measured in dollars. It's measured in disrupted workflow, disengaged employees, and missed business opportunities. Managing the people side of change is an optional. It's essential to realizing value, which, as hopefully, this is familiar to many of you on the call. Imagine what we have here called the Swiss cheese, the future state that has holes in it indicating, weakness or gaps in the current change management practices. And the consequences of those, as I said, it's it's, not just the financial r lower ROI. It's that operational aspect and can result in the cost associated with the change outweighing the benefits of the change. The organization, creates a history of failed change that, just positions for for a culture where people don't don't readily adopt change because they feel that it's going to be worse than than, their current state. You don't get the achieve the the improvements that you're actually after, so, the objectives that you were looking for for aren't met. You've got inadequate adoption and utilization, and then those long term consequences reduce trust in, leadership and, future change initiatives. And then the results don't align with the expectations. So if people think these things are gonna make their day to day better and it hasn't done it, that there's or there's a lack of clarity, insufficient engagement, and then then that impact on morale as well. So the goal is to fill these gaps with effective change management and to transition with minimal gaps that could hinder that, your e successfully ERP transformation. So, again, let's let's get you guys working. Another poll. So how does your organization define ERP success? So is it that the system's on time and on budget and in? Is it that it's in and training's completed, that you've got full adoption and proficiency, that you've achieved the ROI, or or you don't have a formal, success definition? So, on time and on budget, it's an important milestone, but it's just the starting line. Without adoption and usage, even a perfect delivery won't guarantee success. If you're looking at installation and, training completion, training done doesn't equal learning applied. We often stop here, but success depends on whether people can use the system effectively. We go back to our ADCOM model when we look at these sorts of things. Our training can give you knowledge and a little bit of ability, but you need to look at how do you continue to build that ability and reinforce, that that capability as people go through. Full user adoption and proficiency. I love this one. This is a game changer. It's the strongest predictor of your ERP value realization. Adoption turns your system into a solution. So if you want a quotable quote, I like the the that one for for a t shirt in future. The expected ROI achieved. This is what leadership cares about in the long term. So, but ROI only comes after you've got adoption, behavioral change, and sustained usage. If you have no, formal success definition, this is more common than what we think. So without alignment on success, the organization risks chasing different goals and missing the mark. So thank you everyone for, participating in the polls. This is great feedback. Now that we've explored the risks and true costs, let's shift gears and look at what drives success in ERP transformations. When I get asked to describe change management on a slide, this is this is the slide I use. So, it's used within all our training products. It's it's something that Tim Creasy, our chief innovation officer uses. On the technical side, you can say we've got design, develop, deliver. But technical is not just talking about technology. So, when we talk about technical, it could be that we're introducing a new job role or we're doing a organizational restructure. It could be a new process. It doesn't have to be technology. But it's where we design, develop, and deliver tech technical solutions to meet today's opportunities or address issues within the company. Otherwise, what's the reason behind your change, which you can see there on the left hand side. But we all know from experience and research that we only achieve results and outcomes, and success if the employee is impacted or the the, customers or clients, the impacted groups, are brought along for the journey. So they need to be engaged, they need to adopt, and they need to use the solution. And that's where the change management steps come in. At at the center, it shows it shows success is dependent on both of those. That's why we've got a plus in the middle. Both of these are both the technical and people side of change. So and alright. Just lost my bar for a sec. So success factors. Think of these factors as like a chain, and each link strengthens the other. But if one link breaks, let's say you've got a disengaged sponsor or unclear messaging, the entire structure weakens. So it's the alignment between them that enables sustainable ERP success. And there's other contributors top contributors to success based on our research as well. So if our research has consistently shows that the top contributors to project success are not technical, they're organizational. So active and visible sponsorship, being a champion of the change by being an active and visible sponsor. Sponsorship engagement sets the tone for commitment and can significantly influence project outcomes. Cultivating broad engagement creates making creating mechanisms for widespread employee participation and feedback throughout the implementation process is another one of those elements that that really drives change success. So, recent ERP, piece that I did, we periodically conducted assessments to gauge the, readiness of the organization for the change. And when we looked more closely at some some of the specific business functions, one of the areas that stood out was actually the finance group. And, they were one of the teams that had the greatest impact and the highest engagement on the project. But their scores around awareness of why the change was happening, was extremely low. And when we worked through it, we found out that it was because the team was being impacted by how the leader was advocating for the change. And we know number one contributor to success is that active invisible sponsorship. So, of course, knowing, what should happen is only part of the, picture. Let's have a look at some of the real world roadblocks. So, again, going back to our research, it shows that, twenty three percent of the study respondents considered insufficient stakeholder engagement and management as their biggest obstacle. That's a pretty big jump from 23 back down to the next one. So things like difficulties in securing stakeholder time, managing expectations, and maintaining consistent involvement throughout the project life cycle. One change practitioner noted stakeholder time and new stakeholder onboarding as a huge hurdle for, their project. Another pointed out that the length of the project and leadership changes impacted staff trust in delivering on promises in a timely manner. Effective stakeholder engagement is the cornerstone of successful change management in ERP projects. It ensures buy in, it facilitates communication, and helps navigate the complex complex web of organizational, interests. So let's gear up for another poll here. Which factor do you believe contributes to most ERP success? I think we've got a few things coming through. Our insights in terms of this one, strong executive sponsorship is the top contributor to successful change projects with active, visible sponsorships. Sorry? They're three times more likely three point three and a half times more likely to to succeed. And organizations that integrate Centimeters early see significantly higher adoption rates and, business benefits. So, I will hand off to David to take on the next topic on business readiness. Thanks, Kathleen. The next one is building readiness under pressure because as we know, we we are rarely invited into a program right at the beginning. Sometimes we have to come in in the middle or even sometimes towards the end. So So how do we prepare the organization when our time is limited? We're gonna start off looking at our ACR model and anybody who's familiar with Prosci is probably familiar with ACR already. Ideally, change is part of the initiation of the project effort. And there's alignment with the sponsor and the project team and the change lead. As Kathleen indicated, the partnership between, project and change is integral, and we work in concert to achieve the common goals. Let's face it, we're not always included. Our reality is that we're often called on late. Our methodology offers a scalable approach, which can be used in either scenario. At the center, of course, is the individual. Prosci is all about individual change. So we look at who has to do their job differently, or to change their thinking or their behavior for the change to be successful. And that's why IHCAR is such a relevant and appropriate model to support individuals through ERP change. Again, as you heard from Kathleen, the people side of the ERP is often neglected and even if you increase your focus just a little bit, you can have a great impact on the change. So every ERP implementation is a bit different because each organization is different. And who they need to, adopt the change is different, at what level they need to adopt the change is different, and the degree of disruption on the enterprise is also different. So let's first look at the amount of change that the ERP may require for an organization. Now if we compare this change to our smartphones, we'd like you to chat as I go along which scenario represents your organization's experience. So I have one client that is moving from a manual based process to lots of Excel spreadsheet from a lot of Excel spreadsheets and multiple back end systems. This may be like moving from a stone tablet to a smartphone, so that would be like going from a to c. And, no, I am not, from the time of stone tablets, but I do remember a lot of paper based communications. I have also one global client that has many d ERP systems and processes, and they're moving to just one. That'd be like going from a flip phone or several flip phones to a smartphone. You're familiar with technology, but there's a lot more features, a lot more functionality that you have to learn, which meaning the change is more reflective of going from b to c here. And then some may already have an ERP in place and that needs an upgrade or maybe already they have already have a smartphone, but they're getting an upgrade, new apps, etcetera. So that's like going from c to c. So go ahead. I see some of you have already started typing the chat which one you're going to. See some b to c's, c to c plus. That was usually my goal in high school, c plus. B to c, more b's lots of b's and c's out there. The scope and the amount of change gives us an indication of how much effort we need to put into our change approach, as we support the organization. Phase one is all about preparing our approach. And when we follow the structure methodology, this will give you a framework or a guide on how to prioritize our focus. So in our phase one, we try to discover what are we trying to achieve, how big is the change for us, we define the change, we determine the scale of the change, determine what other systems are being implemented on whether side, we're also talking about how disruptive the changes. We need to know who has to do their jobs differently and how they need to do them differently. And we need to talk about what it'll take to achieve success. So understanding this allows us to focus on the areas of who will experience the greatest disruption, whether we're ready for that disruption, where's the most risk, and what happens if we don't adopt. This is one of my favorite models in Prosci. This is a 10 aspect model. When determining how to do their job differently, we use this model. I use it with a lot of my clients and break it down by division and in some cases, department, even down to the individual if you choose. This has allows us to see the variability in the entire population and customize our approach based on each, group or person's unique needs. Focusing on just how or just the system or the tools here would really, cause us to miss the reality of the change and the groups they experienced. Therefore, the limits, it limits our expected benefits and and increases the cost of, implementing the ERP. Here we Prosci, defined 10 aspects of a person's job that could be impacted by any any given change. You determine if the change would be high, medium, or low based on the scoring, and you can see where you need to apply the most focus. So let's say a client has facing has a client facing group of their own, and they might have a lot of self-service options. They would be able to see their customer data through the dashboards in real time. Now this was seen as a huge value for that group and reduce the admin on the back end for the team that has been running the reports and sending them out. The group would no longer need to wait, on the client report, but would have be able to review and book their business at any given time. That sounds like a win win. So, this group was trained and ready in this aspect of it, but the first time they did not receive their standard report, their client report, they were a little bit set back. And the degree and the mindset of the shift was not taken into consideration. Now let's think of another client that has a group or, the accounting team that went from data entry to showing trends and forecasting. Everything has changed for them. Now notice the rings on the right hand side. This is a visual representation of the impact on any particular group. The gray means no impact, the green mean green means, some impact, yellow means medium impact, and red means high impact. The group of role represented on the top would have a pretty extensive impact and experience more disruption than the other groups as a result of an ERP implementation. Compared to that to the group on the bottom circle that's not experiencing, quite as much disruption. So in order to achieve success at a minimum, you need the groups represented by the top rings to engage and adopt and use the technology, and that's where you'll focus your most of your time. You'll begin to consider what will they need to adopt. So once you understand, the impact on people, then you can establish plans to support them, and that takes us into phase two. Phase two is all about developing the plans to help people move through ad card transitions. Having the change, impact insight allows you to prioritize your efforts and focus on the teams and who will experience the disruption and who's most at risk if they don't adopt. We achieve the adoption and usage of the change by creating, implementing, and adapting plans that move people through individual transitions, which we measure through ACR. We need to know what will the change leaders do to pressure equipment and support people. They will build and execute your blueprints, which we'll talk about in a minute for the small scale or large, or if it's a large complex change, then we might develop multiple plans like training plans, resistance management plans, the ever popular sponsor plan, and people manager plan. We need to determine how we're doing, how are the IHCAR journey is going. So we need to, be able to check and see how people are moving through ADKAR and their journey, and is it working, and where are they, and where might they be experiencing barriers. And then we need to determine what adjustments we need to make along the way. So ADKAR is Prosci's individual change model. It describes the five building blocks of successful change. They are stages that people go through in adopting change. And while we present them as sequential, they're not necessarily linear. People can go back and forth through them. A, awareness is, of course, all about building the, understanding of the need for the change. Why is it happening? D is the desire to support and participate in the change and make a personal decision to support in the change. So you can also put decision in for d if you like. K is knowledge and knowing what skills they need in order to adopt a change. And then ability, which is, I think, probably the most misunderstood one. This is the capability of doing your job differently, where you're actually demonstrating the way of doing your work, following the new processes, using the tools. It's important that we get everybody through ability before we go live. People need time to be in the system, follow the new processes, build their competencies and confidence. Ideally, it's important to have a sandbox or some type of training environment. We're actually going through that ourselves a bit these days. This means that in most cases, the group's training is very targeted to their needs and includes not only the system training, but new process training as well. So we know that there are natural tendencies to go back on to our old ways of working and that's where our reinforcement comes in. We wanna make sure people continue with the change and they're intentionally going through to ensure that the change sticks. So awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement or ADKAR, it's when the individual goes through the change, whether it's at work or it's personal. This model can be applied to almost any change at any scale. If you're, if you're short on time, you might consider doing a simple ad car blueprint. Our practitioners know all about that, for each of your impacted groups and which will, accommodate their variabilities and their change within their groups. For larger, more complex effort, you can use the IPR as a framework for more integrated and detailed change plans. There are consequences, of course, to not moving through ACR. And what you can see on this slide can be described as symptoms that people are not making the transition. ACR can be used in an ERP project to diagnose those symptoms and gaps because when one of those blocks is missing, it's inhibiting the change from going forward. So these are some examples of the consequences. You'll notice in the top one delays and implementation. From my experience with, ERP implementations, that is most common symptom that we are having problems. I've seen ERP implementations through SAP rollouts, for example, with a power company that I work with. They were integrating multiple systems into a single our ERP across thousands of employees across multiple locations. One day, we were getting close to go live and it became, clear on many that many of the frontline staff were struggling, not because they were actually resisting the change, but because they hadn't been adequately prepared for how the system could change their daily work. People hesitated to engage fully with the new system. They struggled to complete key tasks. They delayed providing critical information. This led to bottlenecks, missed milestones, and when those delays didn't just postpone return on investment, it actually reduced it over time. Because if a project is delayed six months, a year, a year and a half, two years I've seen them, they might deliver the value, but that value later on is worth less than it was intended to be. Every month the system wasn't fully adopted and chipped away at the financial and strategic benefits of the ERP, which meant was meant to deliver. Another way to increase your likelihood for success is to activate key roles. And we've be said before that change management is a team sport. The practitioner is often depicted as a director of a play in our training, and we work through others to get our jobs done. So let's consider the activation of that team. Who do we need on our team and who do we need to activate? All these roles play a key part in the ACR journey. So for example, sponsors authorize the change and fulfill the a b c in both, being active and visible, building a coalition, communicating the reasons for the change. Employees wanna hear the messages from their sponsor about the vision and the strategic direction. That's where our research shows. People managers support direct reports through their change, journey by fulfilling what we call the Clark roles. Those activities drive all elements of that card through their teams. Teams trust them. They wanna hear from their managers on how they are going to be personally impacted and what they need to do about it. So the people managers are critical and can be our biggest leverage point, and it's important to focus on them. Of course, change practitioners of the change management team apply the structure and the intent for the change. They enable and equip others to play their roles. They shouldn't be the ones communicating directly to the broader audience, but they can help people leaders prepare. They can help the sponsors communicate and develop their communications. Then we have the project team. Their job is to design, develop, and deliver the technical solution by adopting the change and usage and keeping it in mind, to collaborate and on a unified approach with the change practitioner. So let's take another poll. Who do you think has the most influence over ERP adoption? Do You think it's the senior leadership? Do you think it's the middle manager, the IT, and the project teams, or the end users? Okay. I got a lot of b's. Mostly b's. We're getting a lot of middle managers here. Some d, I think end users. Yeah. They have to be engaged. But I think, middle managers are key. They're the ones that are also often challenged by it. Prosci insights indicate from our research that middle managers are crucial to success. So you guys got it. Their influence on adoption of the front line, shape how employees respond to the change. Resistance from middle managers can delay or derail an ERP adoption efforts. And our research shows that they are the most likely to resist and yet, they're the most influence on the end users in the frontline folks. So again, they're critical to the change. Of course, all of our research shows over all of our studies that sponsors are the number one contributors to success on most changes. How does this, how do these employee facing roles align? So let's look at our summary of our change ecosystem here. And the roles that we activate and what order we activate for complex ERP efforts. This is the order in which we intend to activate it. It's critical to have alignment of your sponsor and your sponsor coalition. Most p ERP implementations do not just impact one division. There's generally organizational it is generally an organizational impact and say almost I would say always in the organizational impact. So having the sponsors reach across the division and gain buy in and support from their peers is vital. Once we have alignment at the top, we can then bring it to the people leaders to support their journey as the leaders have changed within their teams, the people who report to them, as the advocates for the ERP change. Now remember, this is the biggest area for our resistance, so we wanna engage with them early and often and have make sure they have the confidence to support their teams. We often say that we wanna get them through awareness and desire before we let them loose on their teams. People managers communicate to their teams, they lead adoption with their teams, and they impact all five elements of ADKAR. Now you may also and choose to, engage a change agent network or change champions or in this case, often user, users who are super users or support users. Let's look at some of the steps for our egocent, systems, building and talk about building your change ecosystem. First of all, you need to understand your organization. Consider the groups that will be end users and how they'll be impacted by the implementation. Build a map with that. This one this map is a hierarchical map. Your organization may not look like this, but generally they do. And then based on the map, determine the coalition members, the people leaders, and, even if you wanna employ some change agents in that process. And then once you met, map it out and consider the first, the frontline users who will have to do their job differently and who will make some type of change. The 10 aspects model now is driving this map. So we're connecting that back to the previous model. So for these four groups, we consider, these 10 aspects and determine that, say, s Jones and m Kowalski teams have the greatest impact. So we create a team of change leaders. They become one of our priorities with any change. And then we build the change ecosystem. We identify key roles who will be involved in the change process. We develop communication strategies, creating a plan, sharing information that's clear and accessible. We engage stakeholders as early as possible. If we can involve them from the outside, that's outset, that's, ideal. We can foster their buy in that way. We provide training and resources, ensure employees have access to the training and support they need to adapt to change. And then we monitor and adapt continually assessing their effectiveness of the ecosystem and making adjustments based on the feedback, the performance and metrics. By creating a robust change ecosystem, the organizations can significantly enhance their chances of successful ERP, adoption and ensure the benefits of the new initiative are fully realized. Once that's in place, we can we're able to leverage and assist in disseminating messages, become a trusted feedback source for tracking progress, identifying areas of resistance. They can become on the ground team who represents the frontline user, our key partners in moving them through the transition of the future, and state change success. There. So why is the change echo system needed for adoption? Well, first of all, fosters collaboration and encourages, different levels of organization by creating unified approach to the change, it builds momentum, it creates energy. It also reduces resistance, it helps us identify and address resistance early on, making employees more comfortable, motivated to embrace the change. It enhances communication, ensures communication flows both ways, creating feedback loops, allowing employees of diverse voice concerns, fostering inclusion, fostering trust, valuable communications, increases accountability. It defines our roles and responsibilities to make individuals accountable for their part in the change process, and it supports continuous improvement and allows ongoing assessment and adaptation and allows us to make necessary adjustments. So let's try another poll. What is the biggest gap in your organization's change ecosystem? Is it a, where there's no clear change champions? B, there's lack of executive support? C, siloed communications? D, insufficient training and retraining resources? Lots of a's, sometimes a and b, sometimes c, sometimes b. So it's kinda all over the board. So what I would expect, it could be different different organizations definitely. Prosci insights say the change networks, including the sponsors, managers, change teams, improve adoption by providing consistent reinforcement and peer influence. Projects with a structured change network see a 30 to 50% better result in the adoption and sustainability. So with that, I'm gonna ask Kathleen to take it forward from here. Thanks, Kathleen. Thanks, David. So we'll be closing out today's, session by touching on early warning systems, so signs that your ERP project might be at risk. So what are the types of risks, and how do we manage them? So resistance and how it might show up if you like. So a lack of engagement from, your subject matter experts, your people leaders not showing up. This could be due to saturation or a lack of understanding of the the what's in it for me, a lack of alignment to the organizational goals, people leaders not prepared for their roles. David mentioned earlier about wanting to to get them to certain points before we let them loose on the rest of the organization. Leadership and and success is not effectively shared and, understood across the organization. So you could have it that working in silos, the lack of collaboration across teams, not understanding how all the pieces of the value stream work together and, interdependent. You don't have a a training strategy that that is, possesses multiple modalities for learning. So you've got whether that be soft paced, leader led videos, job aids, and the like, change management not having, a clear understanding of the impact. So, I too, like David Lee, love our 10 aspects model for for building that real clarity in that space, and the needs for those stakeholders needing to change. Cultural misalignment. So where you that it can remove a sense of, control from process owners. It can increase restrictions on who can access what, tightening control on data, enforcing more rigid processes, and and and what may cause people to feel disempowered. I particularly find that experience where you you're going from that, stone tablet to the smartphone sort of approach where, organizations have had, their current ERP solutions that are highly customized to them so to to their organization and suddenly when they move into the cloud environment, for example, they have, a lot more restrictions and constraints that that than what they're used to. And, a lack of adaptability. So, again, going from those internal those informal workflow flows to more formal ones perhaps as part of that journey and standardized processes. So, not being able to just do work around the edges, so to speak. So some of the ways to uncover the risks, Prosci the Prosci model is great at helping you to do this. Conducting surveys can can help. It doesn't have to be a survey, and you don't have to necessarily go out and go. You at a, you at d, you at k. I have an example with an ERP project, just last year where, we went out and we just had some posters up that people could go up and go, I know nothing about the project. I know about it, but I don't know why I should care about it, and just using some language that actually suited that particular, audience to uncover where their their barrier points were, both at an organizational level because we were doing big roadshow stuff, but also within those individual business functions because that could be replicated right down to the team level. Leverage, the you your net change agent networks and and your key influences and people leaders to determine areas of resistance, having those really great feedback mechanisms and connections for for your leaders who are are playing that, liaison role, and getting that feedback back and and and showing them that you are listening and responding. Your PCT assessment, so your project health assessment scores are another indicator great indicator to to look look at and see where am I at in terms of, those lenses of project management, change management, leadership, and sponsorship. And that definition of success even is is another one that, no matter where where you are coming in as a change practitioner in particular to a project, you can often find you need to go back and have a look at that one to have to to provide that clarity. Or you can, leverage whatever other engagement, surveys or NPS scores you've got. So a a lot of organizations do cultural surveys each year and things like that, so maybe there's an opportunity for you to use those to see, where you where you, can what insights there are around this particular change. So when you've created a proper ecosystem that helps you gain feedback earlier and more often, it'll help to mitigate and address those, early warning systems. We love to hear from you in our next poll on what early warning systems, and concern that that concern you. Sorry. Early warning signs that concern you. Too quick on the button. There you go. So which of these early warning signs concerns you most in an ERP project? End user resisting the change. Hopefully, you know a little bit more about it, but a little earlier than that. Leadership disengagement, poor system data adoption, and, no structured change management plan. So which one's gonna get get your alarm bells going, first or most in this space? So, we all know that, resistance is a common reason for change failure, and organizations that can monitor and address resistance behavior early, improves their success rates. Active and active sponsorship and structured training reduce the risk of ERP failure by increasing that engagement and building that competency that David was talking about in terms of building ability. So, David, I can't see any of the responses that are popping up, but if there's anything if you can see them and share anything in terms of the the most popular of sounds here. Yeah. I I know turning on my mic kinda messes up your sound, so I'll be quick. It's kinda all over the board. Lots of b's, lots of b's, but I think, pretty, big variety, actually. Yep. Yep. So, hopefully, the things we've covered today, have given you some things to think about and maybe go away and and and have a look at how you can, address some things in that space. So, we're gonna open it up for, q and a right now and, have a look at at what questions you've got. We'd love to get your thoughts and questions, in in the q and a pane today. So if we got any questions coming through. How can we help you? Go ahead. Go ahead, Kathleen. How can we help improve your your ARP change management outcomes? Is there anything that any any support you might need? Any questions you have? In our opinion, what is Centimeters change management's role in operational readiness for cutover and preparing the BCP? That's the question. So I think in terms of operational readiness and, you know, as we said, we our role is to make sure, logistically, has everybody received the training they needed in the time they needed? Have they demonstrated the ability to do that? And that that's all done prior to actually going live. And so, I would need to know PCP. I'm not quite sure PCP. I think at this point what that acronym is. But in general, while we wouldn't deliver the training, we wouldn't necessarily be testing the ability ourselves. We our our role in change management is making sure people have gone through that process and that we manage the logistics of it and that people are through the ability phase before they can go live. I I hope that answers your question. David, I might add to that just in terms of, one of the things that I try and do when whenever I'm doing a project, whether it's an ERP or or anything else, is to have some of that readiness data, some of the the readiness information as part of your goal of decision making. So you might not have a role in terms of that actual switch over, directly, but you can hopefully, continue to raise the flag for the people's side of change and whether or not people are are ready for the change and the consequences if they're not and and how the organization might mitigate that so that if they go live and find that they're not getting the utilization the the level of utilization that they're after, that that people are finding it hard and they're having a big productivity hit, that you've you've got ways to actually go in and address those proficiency gaps and those sorts of things or to to have an ongoing program to, continue to build that, proficiency after go live. And we also have another one that says, how do you apply this model to more agile based projects? ADKAR is actually applicable in agile. The differences that you would have, what is the overall project goal? We would focus on awareness, desire, and reinforcement for the overall project goal, but for each sprint, each sprint is considered a change of its own, so we would, but incremental. So they would go through their own ACR, for for every sprint that we're doing and focusing on those particular groups, that are involved in that sprint. So that is something we do cover in the certification program. We actually have an agile interaction with Prosci, program on its own. But it does fit with agile if we look at it as a overall change project. So overall ERP implementation and then each branch which may be, you know, each module. So, I don't know, Kathleen, if you can see the q and a's. I can't know while I'm sharing screen, unfortunately. Yeah. What about when your I'll ask you this. What about when your organization is trying to work that intense pace, embedding new changes within the space of a few months? How can we fast track change management? Oh, that's a good one for you, Kathleen. Well, as I was saying, the the thing is that feel like every project I'm on right now. Yeah. So, I think if that's the only project that they're trying to do at fast pace, it's really about making, smart choices and and and the earlier you can get in, the better to to set yourself up for success in that space. It's about rightsizing change management. So, it's not that you don't go through that process, the phase one and phase two, process that David talked about and the ADKAR approaches and the impacts. It's just that you might do it in a, a much more streamlined way or be more efficient to go, okay. Here's our here's our critical path, if you like, in the things that we actually have to do and when we have to do them. Because as we know as change practitioners, the our our major success is whether or not people have have, made the shift from their current state through that transition to a future state. And so, always look at it in the context of, how do we do that in a way that that fits within your time frames that you've got and and the the organizational culture, but still maintains the that we've done enough to prepare equipment, support people to be ready for a change and be through that change. So, if you want if you want some insights in terms of, how to do that specifically, all those sorts of things, happy for people to reach out either via LinkedIn or to to, give us a call. My role in I can't remember if it was in the the profile at the beginning. So I actually laid the advisory practice here in, ANZ, so my job is to support businesses to, and project teams and and individuals to develop capability and to, do this and do it well. So, you can, reach out to us around helping you with your ERP project or any other project if you've you've got a different one. David's already mentioned a few few things there in terms of the training. We've got that agile process. We've also got some specific digital transformation change manager practitioner change management practitioner certification courses coming up. They're both virtual events. There's one on the seventeenth to the nineteenth in for the ANZ market, and then there's one on the twenty fourth to the June 26 for the Singapore market. I like the just like the highlight, we have poll active right now. Which ERP implementation challenge can your team our team help you address in the next thirty days? So go ahead and answer that poll. We have one more question. I think we have time for one more question, although we're running late. My favorite one that I ever get, which is how do you, get the sponsor on board gently? I'm always thrown when I hear this question, quite a bit, but it is a common one, which is how do we put our sponsors on board? So couple things. One is, we distinguish between primary sponsors and sponsors. So be part of the sponsor coalition. We'll tackle the second one first. So when we have a sponsor coalition, it will be inevitable that some people won't be quite on board, but we'll need them because they're responsible for a particular group. We develop a sponsor plan with the primary sponsor to help bring them on board, have specific stages for them, identify where they are in terms of the ACR, journey, help identify barriers, etcetera, just like we would with any other employee. But I think this question is also often referring to, the primary sponsor when they're not on board with the change. And that's a much bigger problem. I think this is sometimes happening when people are assigned to a change, or they are, somehow delegated into that position. Inevitably, the primary sponsor, should be the person who built the business case for this change that is driving this case, driving this change. So that's something that if that's happening, if I have a primary sponsor or technically a primary sponsor is not on board with the changes, first thing I'm gonna have to deal with. And I'm gonna it's not my role as a change practitioner to get them to be, on board. That is something that actually is something they have to deal with their leader, who is probably the primary sponsor. In that case, I will have to escalate it because I don't think I would go forward with a major investment of this size without a primary sponsor who is actively advocating for it. Now that's just a recipe for, a disaster and a major expenditure for the organization. But, Kathleen, I'd love to hear your opinion on that. Yeah. I've actually got a real life example. So I had a, an executive who was actually like, they were the decision maker. They were the sponsor. They're onboard in terms of, the change happening, the ERP implementation. They were consolidating 30 different systems down to one, so and hadn't had any significant change project in their organization for more than decades. So, it was a pretty big shift. And when when I first met with this sponsor, and we've done a bit of a sponsor assessment, with with key roles that that were in there, and and we we went back with those results. The the this book was quite offensive. And quite sort of like, I can't do any more than what I'm doing sort of thing. And then, I can't I I just continue to do little coaching sessions with them and have some conversations around why it was really important that they the the person who do this and and the techniques that you're using in terms of, maybe not so gently. Sometimes gently, can be missed. But it it it depends on the the the personality type that you're working with. But bring bring almost bringing them to that out of time moment themselves of going, hang on a minute. If I don't do this, then I'm not gonna achieve those outcomes that we're after. My that that's my case. Yeah. I was the leader here. And I think the other thing is helping them to, understand that you're there to support them. It's not a case of highlighting that they they they won't do they're not good at doing their job. It's about and we just we just wanna boost you up a little bit. We wanna know using language like all made and boost and those things with leaders that we find really effective. You know? It's just about the power that you have as a leader in the organization to make the change of success. That would be one of the things I would say. And that's your example. I think that whole initiative around she became a a really great fit for the change, well recognized, but it's a lot sooner and later, and we're very positive about the impact that the management have. Yeah. I mean, there's a there's an underlying, message in that question, which is I, as the change manager or change practitioner, assuming this is coming from that level. And I'm taking responsibility for everything on my shoulders. And remember, that's not the role that we have for the that group. Change management is about bringing the tools and the structure and facilitating things, driving things in the background. But we need our leaders to step up. And that's a message that I'm pretty strong in delivering here in Singapore when I'm in programs or when we're dealing with sponsors or leaders within our the organizations that we work with. So, that's another way you can reach out to us. If you're having leadership that you do not feel is stepping up into their role, come talk to us and we can talk about strategies for helping get them there. But, again, I don't want you to feel like you should take that on your shoulders. That's something that, they should be doing. That's part of their accountability for something like this. Alright. Well, we are past time. So I wanna say thank you to everybody who joined us today and anybody watching the recording. As I said, David and I are both available via LinkedIn or or you can use any one of those contacts that I just shared to, reach out for for further assistance and support. So thank