Article Successful Change Management for Service Providers: Five Steps
By Insight UK / 20 Jun 2022
By Insight UK / 20 Jun 2022
The digital transformation is disrupting traditional structures and patterns throughout society. Think of the way we listen to our favourite music, watch films and television, book holidays or handle banking. For many service providers, this turn-around marks the next step in organizational maturity and forces companies to change; those who don’t do so, lose touch with new technology and modern ways of working and miss out on opportunities.
How do you adapt your business as a service provider from keeping the lights on to consulting for strategic, innovative business solutions? And how do you ensure that your employees follow suit?
In addition to strategy, processes and procedures, service providers see the need to upskill and reskill their staff. Change is a must, but most employees are averse to it and find it hard to cope with the unknown: How will it affect my work; will I keep my job? Pushing change is pointless, so how do you motivate your staff and make change work? The Five C Framework gives you the basic principles for successful change management.
1. Comprehend the need
Successful change is only possible if you have a clear idea of why you want to change. As a service provider, you understand that the evolution of IT and the emergence of new technology mean that the need for change is vital and urgent. Improvement is necessary to create a competitive advantage and a viable future for your business. From this general context, you define the desired result for your own company. What exactly do you want to achieve? This is your focus for a sharp change strategy.
2. Communicate the need
McKinsey found that 70% of change programmes fail partly due to lack of management support. If management is convinced of the need to change and actively communicates this conviction, it is a big part of success. However, communication starts with listening, the other big part of success. Listen carefully to what is going on in the company and how employees perceive change. Be aware of change fatigue and counter it by the next C: connecting people.
3. Connect people
As a second cause of failure, McKinsey mentions staff resistance to new technology. Engage employees and involve them in how new developments will change their work, but can also make it easier, for example by introducing monitoring or automated provisioning and management in daily routines. Create an open culture, foster free thinking, encourage holistic views across silos to realize common goals for the entire business. Or, more out of the box? Develop a game or competition to stimulate new tech adoption and motivate staff in a different way.
4. Carry out change
The ability and willingness to change are important pillars for achieving a successful transformation so address them accordingly. Ability involves training in new technology, but also technical support or a help desk as a follow-up. Willingness is more about the human side: where can employees go with questions, for example about their own position. A mentor can be useful. Furthermore, you can stimulate both by starting with one or more pilots in which you use new technology to solve concrete problems. This immediately demonstrates the benefits in practice and builds ambassadorship.
5. Check, evaluate and improve
Use feedback and input from staff at all levels of the organization throughout the change process. Valuable feedback is not about the past, but about what you can do differently and better in the future, how to work on continuous improvement. Ensure employee buy-in by really listening to the people who work with new technology every day and are experts in how to improve. And very important: remember to celebrate successes!
Bonus: make change the new normal
If you are facing a major change like you might be facing now, this is a great opportunity to set your eyes on the future and develop the capabilities to effectively deal with continuous change within your company. In forward-looking organizations, continual change is the new normal. Their ability to adapt to an ever-changing world is the key to creating long-term value and business success in the long run. Why not join them?
At Insight, we help service providers realize their business ambitions in a multi-cloud world and find new ways forward. As a multi-vendor software licensing, workload, and cloud platform specialist, we can guide you through all stages of your strategic cloud journey. We help you set up subscription-based services and accelerate your business no matter where you are in your journey. Contact one of our cloud specialists for a talk.
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