100 Days of Change
When NetSuite launched its SuiteSuccess program, with the tagline “Zero to Cloud in 100 Days”, it presented a great opportunity for innovation in how they delivered value to their customers. This opportunity also struck the Change Management team, on how to provide a comprehensive change program in a 100-day timeframe. Many of their competitors rolled out change management programs over several months or years, but NetSuite was determined to polish its current offering down to the key components and deliver effective change management for all customers, even those of 100 days.
The process presented a series of key challenges for the team. It was obvious that the same content delivered over a series of months or years could not be done in 100 days, instead, they focused on how to create a lean version without losing value. Once the program was reworked down to the key tenets there was the question of how to drive change. Change is always difficult and the more time we have to communicate, reinforce ideas, and get employees and leaders engaged the easier the change becomes. How could they drive change in a shorter period and still be effective? What trade-offs would arise and how should they be addressed? As they scoped the first 100-day change management projects they realized five key aspects would be necessary if change was going to be successful.
1. Client Knowledge
Because of the short turnaround, the importance of every meeting was increased. The team could no longer take a week or two to learn about the customer, their culture, or the issues they were facing. As they couldn’t increase the number of knowledge transfer meetings held between their sales and implementation teams, they had to make them more effective, with a focus on key issues and potential project complexities. Consultants needed to maximize interactions and address key content in a shorter amount of time. They had to enter the customer on day one with full knowledge of everything that the team knew, as there would be little time to be reactive on this type of project.
To address this, they enabled their sales team to learn more about project resources, goals, relationships, and potential barriers to success. With the sales team gathering additional information relevant to change management in their preliminary meetings, the change team could focus their pre-work, customer research, and initial meetings on gathering the key information that would allow them to begin driving the project. It also allowed them to see if any red flags presented a potential roadblock for success. Like a scout looking downriver, they were able to see the rapids before they hit them, but also be aware of the hazards that were insurmountable and address them with leadership before the project kicked-off.
2. Project Scoping
The first onsite meetings that the change leads had with customers were scoping meetings. These meetings offered the executive leadership team and project team a chance to learn more about how the change management initiative would work and the change management consultants the opportunity to speak with key members of the customer organization about aspects of the change. These meetings explored the change vision, company and vertical benefits, measures of success, and communication strategies.
In a normal engagement, these meetings would act as an introduction for a team that has weeks if not months to learn about the intricacies of the organization, its culture, and the leadership support for the project. In this case, these meetings had to be utilized to confirm the early work they had done around the project and to outline the deliverables, timeline, and responsibilities of the leaders present. The enablement of front-end analysis by the sales team, allowed the change consultants to use these early interactions as an evaluation exercise, validating data, rather than gathering it.
To drive customer commitment and shared responsibility they needed to build a framework for what and how they were planning to deliver. This would enable leadership to make sure the appropriate resources were available and committed to achieving success. This was even more encouraged with smaller customers where they had access to stakeholders and could hold face-to-face meetings. This analysis allowed them to get at the key issues that matter most in a change project and drive commitment from the customer around timelines, resources, and the strategy for the project moving forward.
3. Customizable Templates
While every change management team has base content that they build their offering, these documents are usually highly customized to the needs of each customer. With the short turnaround, the change team realized that they would need to create strong change management templates for each of the key phases in their change model. They needed content that could stand alone with both instructions for purpose and applied use, to limit the need for explanation from consultant to customer.
Once they had a strong base of content, they could then use the time they had to avoid reinventing the wheel and focus on the unique aspects that needed to be customized for each customer. There are five key stages in the NetSuite Change Management Model and content needed to be created in each phase to support its objective. As the SuiteSuccess offering is a standardized process, this allowed for them to base content on templates without losing any of the quality or customer-specific changes that would be expected in a larger more robust implementation.
4. Project Management
While strong project management is important for the success of any project, it was key from within the change management team to roll out a successful offering in 100 days. With a timeline that is moving quickly, it was important for the change team to partner with the other members of the project team to leverage their skills. The ability to identify issues immediately, spotting warning signs before they happen allowed us to drive customer responsibility and made the change agents themselves more nimble and adaptable.
To address this the team created a 100-day change management strategy and roadmap. This document acted as a subset of the traditional project plan. The change strategy allowed them to build a custom approach that used their tools to specifically address the issues of the organization. The strategy creates a structure for change that focuses on three key areas:
Content - The organizational and technical areas you must change.
People - The mindset, behavioral, and cultural change required.
Process - The actions required to plan, design, and implement the change.
The strategy and the roadmap it followed, were living documents. They were revised throughout the change process as key milestones were reached or issues arose. These strategy documents allowed them to build upon the groundwork of the project scoping meetings, while the roadmap acted as a visual project plan that customers could utilize to follow the success of key milestones.
5. Sustainment Efforts
The final piece of the puzzle that they needed to achieve was how to drive sustainment in their customers’ employees to engage with the NetSuite platform one, five, and twelve months after implementation. Many firms fail in this area, diving change until the day of go-live and then stepping away from the organization leaving the customer to manage the change for themselves. They decided that they wanted to be different and used this opportunity to create an assessment of quality and sustainability, which allowed them to gather feedback from the end users about their experience.
This feedback could then be used to:
Assess the rate of utilization after going live
Determine the quality of user adoption
Highlight potential barriers to successful system utilization
With this information in hand, NetSuite could then create a comprehensive plan for their customers to provide recommendations on required areas of focus and determine strategies for continued management support. This assessment and the plan based off its results achieved the goal of leaving behind a measurable system to address sustainability as well as how to make adjustments where needed.
Both a 100-yard sprint and a marathon are races that use the same muscles, but they must be prepared and trained for in very different fashions. The content designed by the NetSuite change management team to support their rapid change offering did just that. By taking the key tenets of their successful long-term change strategies and defining them down to their essence, they have been able to effectively drive and sustain customer change in 100 days.
