Many organizations are asking the same question when it comes to digital transformation—“How do we ensure our organization is adopting new technology to maximize ROI and stay competitive?”
According to McKinsey, on average, enterprise projects run 45 percent over budget, 7 percent over time and deliver 56 percent less value than predicted.
Current challenges in digital technology adoption include:
- Businesses invest budget and resources in the technical deployment and project, but not in the people side of adoption. The result—the technology is rolled out, but employees are not using it.
- Many organizations do not bring all business stakeholders together when making decisions about the rollout of new technology, which creates silos and communication gaps.
- There is a lack of visible leadership support of the project and the technology is launched without connecting why the transformation is essential for achieving business results.
- The technical project is not fully integrated with change management activities, which contributes to low adoption rates.
What are key steps organizations can take to maximize ROI by ensuring that the people side of adoption is achieved?
- Ensure executive sponsorship is active and visible for the duration of the project. According to Prosci, a research and change management organization, the most important factor for successful change is sponsorship. Bring key sponsors and stakeholders together to build a unified vision, strategy and sponsor coalition. Identify essential activities that are expected of sponsors such as communicating your digital transformation vision with an emphasis on “WHY” your organization is transforming and “HOW” the change supports better business results.
- Build a change agent network with a cross-section of individuals that represent your key business lines and workstreams. The purpose of the change agent network is to help build knowledge and ability in all corners of your organization through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing. Your change agent network can be leveraged to develop use cases to help users in workstreams understand what the tools are, what tasks they can be used for, and “What Is in It for Me?” The more users understand the value on an individual level, the more successful the adoption efforts will be.
- Align project planning and tasks with your change management strategy. As part of the technical deployment, it is critical to map current, transition and future states and the impact on the user experience. With technical and change management activities aligned, it will create the opportunity to define gaps, identify resistance, and develop use case scenarios and mitigation plans to ensure the user experience is positive and to facilitate more effective adoption results.
- Ensure that you have a technical roadmap and governance. A strong technical roadmap and clearly defined governance around the technology you are deploying will help streamline the technical deployment and enable more successful user adoption change management delivery.
Projects with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. —Prosci
According to Prosci, projects with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. Employing a structured approach to change enables you to maximize ROI and ensure successful adoption by focusing on areas such as communications, training, sponsorship, coaching, resistance management, and adoption measurement in tandem with technical deployment activities. Answering the question “What does success look like?”—from both a technical deployment and human transformation standpoint—enables the project to achieve digital transformation success.
