A leading American health care provider and not-for-profit health plan needed to manage the transition to a new solution delivery process for its internal IT department. At the same time, the organization needed to minimize business disruption and risk.
Leaders of this initiative turned to Creekside for experienced communications depth and bandwidth while navigating challenging circumstances:
Key Issues:
- Two years earlier, a similar IT solution delivery process was unsuccessfully launched, so stakeholders were skeptical of another try at standardizing with a new approach
- Stakeholders were diverse and multi-tiered, which demanded a variety of high-touch activities to ensure alignment and engagement
- Communications topics were often complex, requiring distillation to increase understanding and accelerate acceptance and adoption
Top Priorities:
- Ensure stakeholder readiness
- Develop scalable — yet somewhat customizable — communications and change activities
- Minimize disruption to the business while meeting overall business goals of reduced IT costs and improved operational efficiencies
- Engage change champions to drive sustained adoption
- Align IT communications with overall company communications to help all adopters understand the “big picture” context, and the rationale for change
Solution:
- Established communications delivery process to define a standard, repeatable process for the core organizational change management team
- Drove an integrated change plan around new processes, training, metrics/reporting, and consistent communications
- Used industry benchmarks and process maturity narratives to help shape the story
- Established standard reporting, performance metrics and executive dashboards to provide milestone updates, and demonstrate success to change champions and executive sponsors
Outcome:
- Moved adoption to planned state after a two-stage release process
- Established communications delivery methods to define a standard repeatable process for the core organizational change management team
- Identified gaps in measures and metrics tracking, and updated standard reporting processes throughout
- Maintained engagement of change champions and when needed, recruited new change agents across the business, in line with the initiative’s governance model
- Developed a portfolio of scalable program communications materials