The Road to Adoption

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Key to any successful organizational transformation is the process used to Adopt the intended change. We at Competitive Computing Consultants Inc. have developed and use a formal Adoption Process that ensures the end-to-end delivery of changes and more importantly, the continuous improvement of the change.

Whether you are looking to introduce platforms such as Office 365 or Webex, or simply looking to transform your organization with the introduction of new processes, techniques or technologies, our Road to Adoption Methodology provides the steps needed to successfully adopt the intended change.

Traditionally, Corporate Change Management is often constrained by not having a set of processes that simply deliver “tangible” outcomes. Simply put, every step taken in the adoption of change should deliver/produce an outcome that you can see, touch and measure. Our methodology has “tangible outcomes” delivered throughout each step.

The “Road to Adoption” Methodology is made up of six steps that begin with the vision of the change and end with continuous improvement.

Deciding to proceed with a transformative change involves various factors and inputs. Simply deciding to proceed doesn’t end with the decision to proceed, it involves setting the context, identifying business 

needs and rounding out the transformation with a set of expectations from the end result.

Key tangible outcomes in this step are:

1. The decision to proceed.
2. Identify the Executive Sponsor.
3. The Business Needs to be met with the change.
4. The high-level structure of the Adoption Team and expected deliverables.
5. The Budget.
6. The constraints that the Adoption Team will need to overcome.

The Adoption Team organization is extremely important to implementing the organizational change. Without a cohesive team that represents the organizational structure, success will simply be constrained from the outset.

In the scenario where your organization is looking to adopt Office 365 or Webex, the Adoption Team should be mandated and empowered to both implement the technologies and, more importantly, the changes to business processes enhanced by the technologies.

Starting with the structure, the Business Sponsor should be at a level that can provide both the executive management direction, and more importantly, provide the influence throughout the organization to adopt the change(s). The adoption team itself should consist of those Organizational Champions that understand “what” and “how” will change within the various areas of the organization.

Key tangible outcomes in this step are:

1. A fully understood Adoption Team Mandate.
2. A team structure that represents the organization.
3. Fully understood roles and responsibilities.

Planning is key to accomplishing the outcomes of the transformation. To plan an adoption, we believe you need to think beyond the schedule of activities. Within this step it is important that the Adoption Team learn everything and anything about the change that will be taking place, understand how to implement the change to the organization, identify the key business scenarios and associated use cases that will need to be updated, rationalized, introduced and accounted for, communicate the change to the organization and train the organization to immediately gain the efficiencies and effectiveness of the change.

Competitive Computing Consultants Inc. sees the planning of the adoption being made up to these key accomplishments:

1. The Adoption Team is well versed and educated on the elements of the change, this includes all methods, techniques and technologies.
2. The Adoption Team understands how to implement the change or transformation within their organization.
3. The Adoption Team pin points and formalizes the business scenarios and use cases that will be updated, made new, introduced and/or removed as a result of the change.
4. The Adoption Team understands how to communicate to the organization throughout the adoption process.
5. The Adoption Team has a strategy and approach for educating the organization.

The results of good planning ensure that the Adoption Team is focused on what is needed to implement the desired change or transformation.

Key tangible outcomes in this step are:

1. An end-to-end schedule.
2. The technical implementation architecture.
3. Detailed outline of Business Scenarios and Use Cases.
4. The Communications Plan.
5. The Training Approach.

With an established and formalized plan in place, the build activities for various streams of work start in this step. All technical setup for the organization, process updates, communications, training materials and user preparation activities are developed, reviewed and approved by the Adoption Team. To validate all the prepared materials, user pilots would be engaged within this step as a means to ensure the appropriateness of the content.

Key tangible outcomes in this step are:

1. User preparation materials.
2. Communications materials.
3. Training materials.
4. Technical implementation.
5. Business and/or technical operational processes.

Once all preparation activities have been completed, the Adoption Team engages in the implementation of the organizational change and transformation. In this step, all activities to inform the users of the implementation, enable the change, implement the technologies, train the users and monitor the progress of the change are executed as planned. 

Key tangible outcomes in this step are:

1. The organizational change or transformation are implemented and baselined.
2. Technologies are enabled for use by the entire organization.
3. All users are trained.
4. Adoption progress reports.

Now that the Adoption Team has implemented the desired organizational change, it is considered baselined and operated at both the business and technical levels. As is the case with process and technologies, organizations require updates when the business climate changes – new regulatory requirements, new products and services, new organizational structures, new technical platforms and underlying products. To manage these changes, which are considered opportunities for improvement, the final tangible deliverable the Adoption Team needs to put in place is the process to update the newly implemented organizational process or technology.