As a change manager and strategic services consultant at RPI, I know exactly why change management is one of the key elements you'll want to consider when preparing for the move to CloudSuite. It might be a little bit less obvious than some of the other considerations that Leigh and Keith have discussed throughout this series. but it’s actually one of the most important things you can do during a migration to the cloud.
Why is change management important to an ERP project? I mean, isn't this really about technology, not people? The real question to ask yourself, is how much of the ROI for this project is dependent upon people changing? More specifically, how much is it dependent upon people engaging, adopting, and using the new system as designed and intended? An example of a low people-dependent ROI initiative is something like installing motion activated lights in a conference room – if nobody moves in the room for 10 minutes and the lights go off, you might save some money. On the other hand, an initiative that’s highly dependent on people changing their behavior would be instituting an office recycling program with new bins next to the trash barrel. If everyone's going to continue to throw everything into the trash, there's really no point in instituting a recycling program, so you need to figure out how to manage the change amongst your team.
A CloudSuite project is multi-faceted and constantly in flux, so think for a minute about where a one facets really sits on that scale of resource dependency. At the end of the day, all organizational change is made up of individuals who are making changes and hopefully doing it together. Really, everything relies on the individual level in order to make up a successful organizational change. If some folks can’t successfully navigate through all the elements of this huge transition by go live, then what you have is an incomplete future state. If your future state is incomplete, so is your ROI and nobody wants that.
