How not to screw up your change process

Have you ever been involved in a change process that had an unwilling working group member or a disgruntled employee lamenting ‘but the old system was easier!’? Why can you never please everyone?

You should focus on change that prioritises users – your employees and colleagues. After all, if change is necessary to improve company performance, why risk alienating those who have to make the change work?

If this work isn’t done at the start of your change process, ultimately you risk replacing one broken system with another. It will cost a lot to fix it retrospectively.

There are steps that you can take early on to save money in the long run.

How service design can save your change process

You can ensure that you are delivering something usable and intuitive for colleagues, something that works for them and allows them to do their best work at your company. How? By doing internal service design.

Internal service designers work hand in hand with experienced change managers to put the employee’s experience at the centre. This ultimately improves the experience of your end customer.

Start with the bigger picture

The only way you can clearly understand how to better design a process is to understand what it is that currently frustrates your employees. What is stopping them getting on with the work actually outlined in their job description?

It may just be that there are bottlenecks in approvals or signoff that are slowing them down. This won’t necessarily be improved by introducing something shinier or more expensive.

Understanding and mapping user needs and pain points at this stage will also avoid roadblocks down the line. Finding those colleagues who are having to use workarounds and hacks to do their job is a goldmine. Their innovations will inform the ways that you can improve on a system or process to make it work for everyone.

Your processes and systems do not exist in a vacuum

Your employees are not using your systems in isolation. Their experience at work sits alongside their experience using a whole host of—often joyful—systems and processes in their everyday lives (and likely in previous workplaces).

If they say ‘I preferred using the tool at my old company’, dig into that. Rather than adding that software to a list of potential system candidates, quiz your colleague on what their experience was of using that software. What made it so much smoother a process? It may not be the software alone, but the way it was customised, implemented or supported.

Properly map current processes

What is it about your processes that are not currently optimal? Understand the full picture of performance rather than focusing on the outdated features of a piece of software, or going straight to comparing the upgrades your competitors have made.

Creating artefacts like service blueprints can support the whole team to understand where the pain points and inefficiencies exist. Don’t just include the software in this mapping, but every email, phone call and nudge that also needs to occur to get something done. Highlight the weak links in your processes. Sharing your service blueprint with your colleagues will make them feel seen and understood.

Put the work in at the start, to avoid the financial burden of change clean up

Mapping entire processes can highlight the most pressing problems.

You get massive benefits by engaging in meaningful research with employees upfront, rather than simply building working groups focused on how to push the change through.

If you need help applying internal service design to your change process, get in touch.