Change management
Using technology for change management
New technology can be a powerful change management tool, providing your organisation with an opportunity to improve the way it goes about its business and delivers its products and services.
The appropriate use of information technology is critical to success for every organisation. It’s an area in which there are frequent innovations, providing the opportunity to improve business efficiency or to create completely new businesses.
Your new application can replace and improve current methods of doing business. During its introduction, activities need to be managed within an organisational change and development framework because technology is just one aspect of improving performance. You need to consider how staff will react, the training required, line management support, other upstream and downstream organisational systems and the culture. All of these will impact on the success of the application and overall business performance.
When implementing change, we focus on the key foundations of organisational capability that will make change happen.
- The Business Systems that sustain the organisation, supporting structures and enabling processes
- The People of the organisation who, through their skills and motivation enable business systems and technology to create value
- The Project Dynamics that are energised and controlled to deliver the required end-state that satisfies the need and drives performance
- The Technology that will really make the change work — it is important for both business management and IT management to understand the desired outcome, what technology can and cannot do to enable it, and how to run the implementation to achieve it
This approach is critical because introducing a new piece of technology, by itself, does not mean that you will instantly achieve higher performance. There are a range of factors that contribute to performance and we need to be aware of them. This can include individual motivation and ability, social / team structures, culture, performance management and reword systems, and organisational systems and structures.
We help you understand and address the range of factors contributing to high performance, to ensure strategic alignment between your technology application and the surrounding systems and structures, human resources, communications and corporate knowledge.
Using the Balanced Scorecard to manage IT success
Traditional user centred design is concerned with individual performance and, indirectly, with business performance. We use the Balanced Scorecard to explicitly and deliberately focus on the four key measurement and management areas of customers, staff, financial and process.
This provides a decision making framework for our activities and ensures that whenever an action or decision is made, it is done in the context of its contribution to the stated performance indicators.
The Balanced Scorecard can be broadly represented by the following diagram:
The importance of key performance indicators can be summarised as:
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
The Balanced Scorecard is more than just a measurement system. It is used to define and implement strategy at all levels in an organisation. It helps organisations by:
- Creating a line of sight between initiatives, KPIs and strategy
- Communicates the strategy
- Aligns people’s activities to the achievement of the initiatives and associated KPIs
- Provides timely feedback on progress towards KPIs
It has two primary roles:
- To ensure other things that need to change (if anything) to maximise and sustain performance improvements over the long term are also done
- To keep the application requirements, design and development focussed on business performance and KPIs, as well as the identified key drivers of organisational performance
Once the BSC has been completed for the organisation, the next step is to create a balanced scorecard for the application itself, called the design scorecard. The design scorecard provides a line of sight between artefacts of the user interface (e.g. number of steps in a process, functions provided, etc.) and the business KPIs. Each of these artefacts therefore contributes in to the achievement of the KPIs. This way, when testing the user interface (as you design, or formally in usability testing) you can estimate how well the user interface is able to (or will) meet the business KPIs and therefore the return on investment can be calculated.
Understanding the broad organisational system
The Socio-technical Systems (STS) theory considers that every organisation as made up of people (the social system) using tools, techniques and knowledge (the technical system) to produce goods and services valued by the customer (who are part of the organization’s external environment). How well the social and technical systems are designed, with respect to another and with respect to the demands of the external system, determines to a large extent how effective the organisation will be. The concept of the socio-technical system was established to stress the reciprocal interrelationship between humans and machines. Its role is to foster the program of shaping both the technical and the social conditions of work in such a way that efficiency and humanity would not contradict each other any longer.
What this means in practice is the avoidance of the common problem of producing systems that are technically effective but fail to achieve business goals.
Email us at info@ptg-global.com or call 1300 660 973 to discuss how we can help you make your technology work.
