Written by Robin Thys
Digital transformations vary from implementing new software features to enormous companywide operational changes. For example, a minor transformation might involve updating an internal communication tool, while a major one could include migrating all company data to a cloud-based system. Regardless of the transformation's scale, overcoming change aversion is essential. Employees often resist changing their way of working and are reluctant to learn new technologies. Change management is a necessary part of any digital transformation.
Not so long ago I started my latest project, working on building a new application to replace a legacy application within the government. Before my arrival, the project had been going on for a while with varying success and multiple delays. Information about these delays rarely reached the users in a timely or constructive manner. A rift began to form between the development team and the business users as they were slowly losing the faith they had in the project. Moving forward from that lack of trust is difficult, but there are multiple proven tools at our disposal that can help. We will discuss three of them in this post, which we used successfully to turn things around.
IKEA effect
The first one gets its name from the most famous self-assemble furniture company in world, IKEA; when putting your own furniture together, you tend to be prouder and more invested in it. This psychological effect is called the IKEA effect. This does not only cover furniture, but the cognitive bias is proven to also apply for all other products, including software. Being involved in the creation of the product yourself, you are therefore more invested in its success and more intrinsically believe in its value. So, involving end users from the start in your digital transformation project, and giving them the feeling they are co-building it, highly increases their ownership.
2. Transparency
This second aspect is a little more obvious: open and honest communication. Being honest about delays and overall project progress is not always easy, but is crucial to progress the project. Transparency is a requirement to keep trust between parties.
3. Feedback loops
Communication is great, but only when done structured and regularly. Regular updates are mandatory to guarantee collaboration. This can be done using a typical scrum framework with sprint reviews, but it’s not limited to that. Weekly standups, bi-weekly sync meetings or any other type of reoccurring meeting. These help keep the development fresh in the mind of the users and keeps them invested. Periodic meetings are a great way to implement the transparency and IKEA effect as well, as it enforces commitment from both sides.
Having an approach is a good starting point, next up is putting these into practice. I’ll give some concrete examples of how we approached this in the project. We started structured meetings in three forms:
Once a week we sat together with both developers and business in workshops. This meeting is meant for the business users, not the management. These people are the adopters you need on board to get people using a new product. Initially this started by running through their as-is workflows, but this evolved over time. Later on, when development was further along, we showed them mock-ups and proof of concepts asking their opinions every step of the way. Letting them touch and feel the application, they became more invested in the applications.
A second type of meeting is a “review” meeting, as is typically used in Scrum development environments. At the end of each sprint the team can show of their accomplishments to the end users in a demo.
Finally, a biweekly meeting with the more senior business profiles was held to discuss updates. Delays, limitations, but also the positives, news about releases and successes are discussed here. Doing this netted us a more explicit positive reaction than before, as well as more understanding when things did not go as expected.
The result? A collaboration that left everyone pleased with the result. The development team was proud, the management was pleased and finally the users themselves were happy to use software tailored to their needs.
Do you have plans for a digital transformation, or are in the middle of one, and want to talk about change management implementations? Feel free to reach out to Robin Thys of Sven Van Hoorebeeck.
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