AJC Bridge ERP System Selection: Change Management

Hi, I'm Andrea Jones and this is the third and final bridge I have for the ERP selection video series. We talked about our selection process and we even did a little sub video on technology landscape mapping. In the first bridge, we talked about ERP selection roles, responsibilities and the timeline for the whole selection process. In the second bridge, we talked about contract negotiation points. And this bridge we're going to talk about how to get started on your change management communication, sort of organizational adoption for this new system. So change management may or may not be a word or a term you like to use, but if you think about it, telling everybody in your company who usually will interact with this system to do their work, whether they're placing orders, whether they're fulfilling orders, whether they are in the accounting system, whether they're including customer data or receiving reports or putting in supplier information or buying parts or whatever it might be, you know, this is kind of like saying to your kids that you're going to move and depending on whether you're only moving houses in the same town, right, it might not be a big deal. So maybe your team is pretty open to change. This is sort of incremental improvement for them. You already have something decent, this is just making it better. Or maybe it's something they've been asking for because what you have is really terrible. So you're anticipating them being excited or you're going to move them across the country, you know, like I did to my kids a couple of years ago. And they may or may not be super thrilled about that. People don't always love to change. So be thinking about how you're going to share this with them. Remember the leadership team, who's typically been the ones on the steering committee, maybe some high level managers as well, they've known about this for a while. Timeline was five months. That's kind of what we said might have been longer. And you probably were even discussing it before that. So the leadership team's had some time to come around to the fact that the system upgrade or change is needed, but the entire team, this could be the very first time they're hearing about it. And perhaps if you anticipate a really long implementation, you might not tell them before you get started. But I don't know about that. I kind of think it's a better idea to say, hey, we've got some good news about how we're going to keep this business sustainable for the future. And our team has written this kind of communication memo with the help of, you know, the leadership team. Really getting their input to understand their culture and make sure that we're saying things that resonate with them, giving rationale that makes sense to that organization. But ideally, what you want to communicate is enthusiasm, aligned advocacy for this project across the entire leadership team. Anticipate questions or concerns people might have and come up with some basic responses that everyone can give that are the same. So one person's not saying, here's why we're doing this, another person saying, here's why we're doing this, and they're totally misaligned. Also, what feedback mechanisms will you allow for? Do you want the team to come directly to leadership team if they have questions, do you want them to go to their managers first? If you want them to go to the managers, you better make sure the managers have been equipped with the right Q and A and messaging so that you're all saying the same thing, marching in the same direction. And I do recommend once you especially sign the contract, you're about to get started with your vendor team sending this communication out in whatever channel or multiple channels you use at your company, whether it's email, intranet, posters, conversations, town halls, all hands, any anything or multiple things. Remember, people need to hear things a few times before it sinks in. And they're probably not all going to be super thrilled the first time. So, you know, give them the time. Give them the time to be ready. Give them kind of a basic understanding of how you're going to train them, reassure them. Nobody's going to be asked to do this without training. We're going to make sure everybody's ready to go. And you can watch our change management series on how we follow the ad car process for that. And I'll also talk about it in parallel with the implementation process. All right, thanks so much for watching and good luck with your implementation.