How to Rescue a Nonprofit Technology Project with Change Management pt 2: with Debbie Cameron

Change Management Lessons with Debbie Cameron

Build Consulting Partner Debbie Cameron and change management expert in a webinar on when you can rescue a nonprofit technology project using change management techniques. 

In part 1, Debbie describes the philosophy of change management and how these techniques work in helping the people at your organization understand and adapt to big changes. In part 2, she discusses how to rescue a failed project and some techniques to turn a project around. She also gives a mini-case study and takes audience questions.

It is never too late to go back and re-assess where change management best practices can help.
Learn how to use change management principles to get more out of your nonprofit technology investments and rescue a tech project that hasn’t succeeded – yet.

Do you have a technology tool that is not living up to expectations?

In an ideal world, change management would help inform three main phases of technology project implementation: planning, during, and after go-live. Build Consulting curated a three-part video series with Debbie Cameron, change management expert at Build Consulting, walking through the Build philosophy and providing best practices and examples at each stage of nonprofit tech project management.

But what if you weren’t present for the entire project? What if you are facing a project that isn’t going well – that you inherited – a technology tool that your organization is paying for but everyone hates – a tool your organization is stuck with … is there still a role for good change management? Is it too late to use change management best practices to rescue these projects?

In this new webinar, Debbie shares techniques and tools to help analyze where change management can support implementation after technology change.

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Thanks for listening.

Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Webinar, Can You Rescue a Technology Project with Change Management? My name is Carolyn Woodard. I'm the Outreach Director for Community IT.

Debbie Cameron: Hi, everyone. I'm Debbie Cameron, a Partner with Build Consulting. 

Readiness and Sentiment

So, readiness and sentiment. We know who’s impacted. We’ve heard some things in a listening session. We’ve also had the opportunity to have a dialogue in the listening session. But you do want to give the private space for folks to really be able to communicate in a more detailed way than they could in a listening session, and a more private way than they could in a listening session about how they’re feeling. 

We want to ask how they’re doing. We want to ask if the system hasn’t been rolled out yet, like, are you feeling ready? If you’re not, tell us why. What are we not doing to make you feel like you’re going to be successful? Are you just confused? Are you frustrated? Let’s assess that before we go any further. It doesn’t have to be a long survey. 

I put the Build Change Readiness Gold Standard Survey that we would use at the beginning of a large initiative. These are kind of the categories that we would ask questions in, but it doesn’t have to be that. It can be a short baseline survey to just check in and figure out where folks are so that we can take their temperature later and understand if the efforts and the actions we’re taking are making a difference, or if we’re totally missing the mark. 

Another thing I love to do, and mostly because it lands with leadership, is I love taking the survey data and creating visualizations of survey results to show team sentiments and readiness. 

You can use heat maps and dashboards, but that tends to really land and help guide decisions. It’s a great way to easily spot where we need to focus our energy, where we need to put our time and support, so we’re not just guessing and just saying, okay, we need to train and we need to do it this way, and we think this will be the most successful. 

And again, there’s many ways to execute a change readiness survey. The important takeaway here is to just make sure we’re gauging sentiment and readiness. We use what we learn from the survey to inform training, communication and coaching. And it allows us to establish a baseline to measure progress.

Carolyn Woodard: Just jump in to say I was at a session a day or two ago about using AI to take information like this to put into a visual. So, it’s one of those areas that I think, you know, once you’ve got this information, if you do want to make some kind of graphic or visual aid for other people in your organization, it’s getting a lot more easy. It’s getting a lot easier to do that.

Debbie Cameron: That’s really cool. I like that. Thank you for sharing that. 

Technology Change Management Plan

And then once we have these outputs that we’ve gotten from the discussions on our change vision board, we have outputs from our listening sessions, outputs from our change readiness survey, we can build a plan that helps meet people where they are, helps figure out what techniques, what support things do we need to put in place to guide them through this. 

And a change plan doesn’t, it’s not about, let’s fancy plan. It looks great. It’s final. It’s a living, breathing thing. There’s lots of components. 

I put in the components of the Builds Change Management Plan. And you don’t need all of this. But you really just want to make sure your change plan is set up to dig into what’s changing and provide transparency into the efforts that are being put forward and organize those efforts and assign ownership of those efforts to support the transition and make sure that all of those are in alignment with our long-term objectives so that we’re working towards the right thing.

So again, on the next slide, we’re going to dig into each of the categories that Build uses in their change plan. But if you’re currently underway or you’re already live, the key takeaway here is don’t wait for the perfect plan. Even the simplest, lightweight plan with clear actions, and most importantly, owners can make a huge difference. 

Start small and build as you go, because progress beats perfection every time. 

Change Framework

Now, if you want to do the big, very thorough change management plan, the components that we think are important are having a change framework to approach this. That basically means outlining the foundational structure and methodology which guides the change process. It’s typically aligned with a recognized model like Adkar or Kotter, and it sets the stage for how change will be approached. 

On the next slide, I’ll walk you through Build’s Change Management Plan, because I like it because it can be the right size for your organization. 

Change Journey

Change journey is about the emotional side. It’s about the stakeholder’s experience that’s associated with the journey that they’re making to go through this change. And what it does is it helps us visualize the progression of the change from their perspective, because change often evokes emotional responses in people. 

And so figuring out which emotion is coming when just helps you figure out a more appropriate communication or coaching, or maybe it’s time to step back and be a little quiet. 

Approach & Timeline

Approach, what is our strategy to lead the change? This is what really needs to be tailored or specific to your organization or project, because it needs to be things that work in the culture of your organization and tailored to the complexity of the change. 

Timeline, pretty self-explanatory. 

Tools

Tools and intervention techniques. These are the tools and resources that you’ll use throughout the change process to engage with those impacted. If you only do this part of the change plan, huge, wonderful, successful. Well, this is the timeline. Timeline is important too. But it’s about the training, the communications, the coaching. Are you setting up a change champions network? Are you setting up power users? What are your support constructs? Things like that. 

Management & Oversight

Then finally, management and oversight. That’s again really about assigning that ownership and making sure that we have an understanding of who’s doing what and when. 

Build Consulting Change Management Framework

I reference Build Consulting’s framework as an example. We built this framework because we find you can scale it to small changes or large changes and really, it comes down to four phases. 

Define success. 

What are we trying to achieve? Where are we trying to go? Do we have a clear vision of that? Have we clearly communicated that? It’s all that change vision that we talked about earlier. 

Impacts

Then it’s about understanding the impacts. Have we truly dug into what’s changing? Have we identified who will be affected by the change and how? Getting into the weeds here for them is important. Focus on activities that ensure that all potential impacts are understood and addressed.

Engage. 

Engage with stakeholders in an effective way. This is about those intervention techniques. How are we doing it? When are we doing it? Do they know it’s coming? It’s very important that they know that we’re putting effort and planning into making sure they’re supported. 

Iterate

And then iterate, continuously improve, because we learn through everything we do, and the FIAC loops that we set up help us learn and help us iterate. 

Adoption Plan

And then finally, let’s ensure they adopt and thrive. We have the change plan in place. How do we ensure people actually use the system? The answer is the adoption plan. How do I build an adoption plan? What is an adoption plan? 

An adoption plan outlines strategies to ensure users embrace the new system, providing them with the necessary resources, training and support throughout the transition. 

So again, I have the sections of Builds typical adoption plan outlined here. But if you’re already on your way or live and we’re onboarding folks, let’s just focus on the purple boxes, which are our short-term change objectives. 

Because if we’re late in the project, or again, if we’ve already gone live, the focus should be on how can we make things happen in the short-term. The actions needed to gain some momentum with our stakeholders and get them engaged with the project, or get them onboarding to the new system. 

Short-term Change Objectives

KPI Tracking and Evaluation

Typical elements focused on short-term objectives are KPI tracking and evaluation. This is where we define exactly how we’re going to measure success in the short-term. This is where we set up a system for tracking. What are our key, like how do we know people are engaging with the system or engaging with the project? Outline some goals, define some metrics associated with those goals, some targets and milestone dates to ensure that we’re moving towards our target, and clear evaluation criteria to see that we’re making some progress. 

User Satisfaction Surveys

User satisfaction surveys, we have our baseline. We want to check in with users to see how they’re feeling as this goes along to make sure we’re actually making a difference, to make sure we’re moving the needle. This helps us understand their experience and helps us address things quickly. 

Leadership Alignment & Actions

Leadership alignment is always a critical component. They play a crucial role in championing the change and communicating the change and supporting the change, but they need to model the behavior. And setting those expectations and defining those things in the adoption plan helps them know what they’re supposed to be doing and what the expectation is of them to help this project be successful. 

Adoption Risk Log

And then at Risk Log, it’s always great to just keep risks out in front of us, talk about them, develop mitigation strategies. It just helps us stay ahead of things before they hit. 

What if I Inherited a Mess? 

Okay, so what if I walked into a project or I’m in a project that’s a mess and it’s off-track, what would I do? Because some of you may be saying at this point, thanks for all this information, Debbie, but that was a lot. Can you just distill this? What do I need to do in the next week, in the next month?

I encourage you not to panic. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but take a deep breath and remember that every problem has a solution. 

Start by clearly communicating the vision. It’s important to do it in a visual way. 

Build a stakeholder matrix. This tool will help you identify who is impacted and make sure you understand kind of where they are in the process. 

Hold a listening session. These are great for understanding the concerns and needs of your team, and it’s really about rebuilding trust and showing that you care about their input. 

Leverage a survey. This will give you a clear picture of how folks are feeling where they are. How can we re-engage them? Meet them where they are. Hopefully, it highlights areas that need extra support. 

And then identify quick wins. Use all of the outputs from this to look for small, achievable goals that can quickly demonstrate progress and rebuild confidence in the project.

Carolyn Woodard: I feel like when you, when it wasn’t your project, when you’re coming into a situation, like maybe you’re the new IT director or you’re the new database manager or whatever it is, you can do those listening sessions, right? You have a different kind of leeway, there’s a different vibe where you’re just like, help me help you, what doesn’t work with this tool? 

And it can help get a lot of opinions out that maybe they wouldn’t have told the original person who was gung-ho on this tool.

Debbie Cameron: I mean, talk about a great way to get quick context of where things are. A listening session is a great way to do that. 

It’s Never Too Late to Introduce Change Management. 

Again, start small. Begin with manageable steps that can show quick results. Anything to help build confidence and gain some momentum. 

Iterate. Show that you are pivoting. Show that you are reactive to the information you’re collecting. You’re not just plowing forward whether folks are communicating with you or not. Continuously improve and adapt your approach based on the feedback and results. It’s all about learning and evolving. 

And build trust. Focus on transparent communication, collaboration, on problem solving, and involve your team in the process. Trust is really key to any success, but definitely to change management success. 

Mini Case Study: Turning a Project Around After Launch

So a real life example about how we turn things around. A lot of it’s going to sound familiar because I employed a lot of what we talked about today. After there was a system launch, an organization came to us. They had worked on a CRM implementation and adoption just was not happening. 

So instead of pushing harder, they pivoted. They said, we’re going to engage some change management expertise, which went a really long way with their staff because they were like, okay, they understand we need help and we don’t know what we’re doing. 

And the first thing we noticed was confusion. So we did the change vision session. We brought everyone together to talk about what success looked like. We made it visual. We made it collaborative. We did it virtually. During a listening session, we presented that vision board back to a broader group. And it made it easy for folks to share feedback. 

We had a QR code, tell us what you think. Really understood where people were struggling. People were very honest and transparent, and they really were open to this format. And we didn’t try to fix everything at once. We set short-term goals, and we were honest with them about that. And we rolled out practical support. We did office hours, lunch and learns, job aids, and leadership really delivered, because they started modeling the behavior. 

We put together an adoption plan with expectations of every role in the organization, including leadership, and they did what we asked of them. And we kept the conversation going. We set up feedback loops, so concerns and ideas could surface, and we could keep improving. And the results, people felt hard supported, and they started using the system. It wasn’t the gold standard use that they had dreamed about for the long-term objective. 

They did get there later, but it was about short-term wins and progress. 

Resources from Build Consulting

So I’ll share our link to our change management resources, some of which I referenced earlier. Check them out. Hopefully, you’ll find them helpful. 

And please, just an invitation to follow us on LinkedIn. And of course, if you’re interested in learning about how Build can support your next technology project, please email sales at buildconsulting.com.

Q&A

Carolyn Woodard: There’s a couple of questions that came in at registration. So, some of them, I think you’ve already answered. 

But one that I thought was interesting was if you are in a organization where their culture has maybe never heard of change management, how do you have some advice on how to introduce, you’ve just gone over a whole bunch of concepts and tools and like a standard procedure that you go through that is change management. 

How do you introduce this whole philosophy of change management to an organization that maybe has never heard of it?

Debbie Cameron: I like to use the term people are the hardest part of a change. And I think if you Google that saying, you will find, no, I joke. I think it lands. I think if you talk about the people side, if you talk about the fact that if we don’t get folks on board, and if we don’t get folks brought along, it lands. 

And I think if you just, there’s tons of resources on ProSci too, that distill this down. But I think if you just start talking about the people side of the change, and struggling and frame it in that way, it will really go a long way. It will land for folks.

Carolyn Woodard: All right. Well, I think let’s go ahead and go back over our learning objectives, because we’re almost at time. 

So we were hoping that by the end of this hour with Debbie, we would understand a lot more about change management techniques, which thank you so much, Debbie, for sharing your experience and your decade and more of experience with this and using these techniques at nonprofits, because we could really just hear your experience and your explanation.

Learning why technology tools and projects fail. And I want to emphasize again, like at businesses, at small businesses, at nonprofit. Nonprofits don’t have like the lock on technology tools not working out perfectly. So don’t feel like this is always a problem at nonprofits. But there are a lot of reasons at nonprofits why some of this can happen. And I think we went over that pretty well. 

Discussing what you can do, still do later in a technology project. I love that you had those couple slides there about like, I inherited a mess. Now what do I do? 

Learning some tools and tactics to re-engage the team. I love the ideas of the listening, doing the surveys, just really trying to get a handle on what is not working. 

And then never forgetting to do that vision. You know, like doing the visioning board, doing a vision meeting where you can get everybody to say, like, here’s where we’re trying to get to. Remember? Here’s where we’re trying to get to. Really, really help when you encounter those roadblocks along the way. 

And then I love the real-world success stories that you had. 

I have a little quick anecdote back to, I said that I was at this place that had Raiser’s Edge that was just, like, way too much of a tool for what we were able to do. And our executive director used his Rolodex. Like, he had a Rolodex, like, 40 years of contacts and major donors, etc. And he had no intention of ever putting any of his contacts in the CRM that they had made this big investment in. So, if you have leadership who’s not using it, not willing to use it, it’s very hard to convince everybody else that they’re going to use it and it’s going to be great. So, that’s my little real-world success story.

Debbie Cameron: A good one.

Carolyn Woodard: I want to make sure before we end to invite everyone back to our webinar next month, which is Cybersecurity Essentials for Nonprofits. You can register on our website right now, which is communityit.com. 

This is a question we get a lot of what are the five to ten essentials that any nonprofit of any size and any mission should have in terms of cybersecurity. So, we’re going to have this panel next month of our own CTO and cybersecurity expert, Matt Eschelman, and our good friend and cybersecurity expert, Ian Godesman, who is from NGO ISAC. They’re an association of nonprofits that share best practices and know-how around cybersecurity. And so, they’re going to talk about a few trends and current issues and they’re going to take audience Q&A on cybersecurity essentials. 

I want to make sure if you’re not a tech person, please don’t worry that this webinar will be hard to understand. Both of these people are just great at talking about these complicated concepts in ways that I can understand. So, if I can understand it, I know that you’ll be able to understand it. 

It’s on Wednesday, October 15th at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific. And as I said, you can register on our site now and check out communityit.com for all of our past webinar videos to register for any upcoming webinars. I’m going to put in the chat the link to the Reddit, which is r/NonprofitITManagement/. We’re going to go over there and answer a few more questions if you have them. 

And Debbie, I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise, maybe introducing to some people this idea of change management, helping people see practical ways that they can, some actual steps that they can take to try and rescue those projects. So thank you so much.

Debbie Cameron: Thanks for having me.