Strategies for Effective Change Management in the Digital Workplace
Change is inevitable, continual and is becoming the defining characteristic of the modern business. In this digital world, IT is expected to drive innovation.
Digital services are very different from the IT services. They are mobile and highly intuitive, evolve at high speed and operate at a scale we have never seen in the traditional IT world. Increasing digitization means reinvention of the organization where people need to be more productive and informative.
There are many hidden complexities with new technologies and deployment models that implements change. It gets harder to identify and quantify the risks associated with a given change. A tiny error can have a disastrous impact on business revenue. To overcome the issues, a robust and repeatable approach has to be developed to change and release management that takes into account the relentless pace of modern commerce.
Change management efforts in digital workplace require patience, energy and perseverance. A successful strategy needs to be developed within the context of your organization’s needs and through collaboration it must allow for evolution by being responsive to your culture and environment.
Key strategy to maintain
business agility in digital workplace which helps changing behaviour of users so that they can work in new and different ways.
- Education
IT and non-IT professionals should be given formal education to undertake the technology change in controlled and managed way. IT departments have started educational courses titled as ‘IT Change for Non-IT Professionals’ for non-IT employees. These courses aim at equipping those making changes with a basic understanding of risk valuation, forecasting, monitoring, and roll-back activities.
- Process
Moving a Change Request (CR) through a carefully planned and documented process can offer great peace of mind and greatly reduce the possibility of severe disruption to business operation. Adopting a formalized and structured approach has led to a tremendous increase in change implementation success rate.
- Automation
Automation can bring huge benefits during change implementation by automated modeling and visualization of hybrid infrastructure. The overall change management process can be accelerated by adopting advanced automation techniques.
- Communication
Even with great technology and design implementation in place it is really important to budget resources for communication during deployment. Considering a communication strategy can add value.
Few other activities for managing a change in digital workplace are –
- Change management activities should happen over the entire life-cycle of the digital space platform i.e from design phase until it becomes business-as-usual.
- Change management efforts changes with time. Efforts need to be more intense once the change is deployed.
- Different groups and departments impacted with change should be kept updated with the ongoing activities.
- When deplying a change in digital workplace globally rely on local managers to help cordinating and deploying change.
- Involve teams from different functional areas such as HR, IT and training. Leveraging there skills and perspectives can help reducing change efforts.
- Avoid complex concepts and vocabulary while communicating with business and employees.
- Arrange training sessions for all level of people – ranging from senior managers to freshers which can be highly effective.
Digital Transformation is a new measurement of change management. As organizations try to understand, integrate and deliver new digital strategies it requires an
effective and efficient change management process in the digital workplace.