Don’t Overlook Change Management During Tech Upgrades
Are you taking your firm to the next level with technology? Moving away from servers and remote access to web-based systems? Switching office systems can inspire excitement in some, but others may try to derail progress. The resisters may ask “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”. The plan to upgrade your firm’s technology should include a change management strategy to help ensure success.
Any Change Needs to Be Managed
Even though you feel strongly that the improvements to your systems – whether that is a new practice management, time/billing, CRM or document management system – are necessary, there may be some people in the firm who will not greet the change with enthusiasm. Change of any kind is often resisted and one person in the firm could make the process difficult or even derail it. Plan to manage the change along with your plans for the system updates to get the best results.
Define the Vision
Your firm’s technology may need upgrades or migration due to latency, feature inadequacies, instability, or age. However, those are just some of the arguments for making the change. Express the vision for the improvements to provide the complete picture. How will new systems or software improve the client experience, the firm workflows, enhance efficiency, increase billables, and improve the team’s ability to get work done?
The old expression states that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Accordingly, it is vitally important to give considerable thought to the plans for the introduction of the change as well as for people and organizations’ first exposure to the new system. Identify the roadblocks and strategies to cope with them well ahead of time. Identify tactics to deal with issues before they appear. Bring people into the process early on and let them shape the eventual systems, policies, and procedures. Listen to their concerns and respond accordingly.
Managing Change = Managing People
If everyone openly adopted change, there would never be any need to be concerned with implementing change. However, there will always be three groupings of people and organizations when change is involved:
- Enthusiasts (who recognize the benefits of the new system and line up to help spread and support the new system),
- Backbones (most people and organizations who are solid performers and who will support the change since they are reliable workers) and
- Resisters (those who oppose change either due to a perceived loss of power, status, money, or other attribute or who simply do not wish to expend the time and/or energy to change).
Obviously, you need as many people in the first two camps and as few in the last one as possible. You may have some hard decisions to make – if someone who stands in the way of the change consistently opposes you, you may have to decide if their future may lie outside of the firm.
A change such as moving to a new practice management application cannot be done by one person alone. You will need the support of the highest level of management as well as the right mix of team members at all levels in the organization who are willing to put their shoulder to the wheel to help bring about the change. Remember that not everyone will buy-in to the idea at the outset. You need to give careful thought to who will be on the team to lead the change. But the people on the team should be seen as some of the most powerful individuals in the firm (and ensuring that you have their full support). Don’t make the mistake of failing to realize how powerful a force a good change team can make. You need to overcome that most powerful force called inertia and to achieve this, you will need an equally powerful team.
Divide the team into working groups that have a focus on each specific part of the overall goal. You will want to have a team to evaluate products, making sure to involve different end user roles. If you have internal or external IT staff, make sure they are involved early and know what role they will play. Make sure costs – hard and soft – are adequately accounted for by your finance folks. Have a team to test the new system and report bugs.
Schedule regular meetings (say the first and third Tuesdays of every month) with a rolling agenda that calls for reports on accomplishment of goals by each working group of the team. There is an old expression that states, “what gets watched, gets done.” By holding people responsible for task accomplishment, you keep the entire team on track, energized and focused on the goal. Make sure to involve people who will be impacted by this change, so they feel like they are well equipped to handle it. Be transparent about the anticipated time commitment and work with your team on prioritization in their schedules if they express concern.
Changing Business Processes
In addition to learning how to use new software or systems, a firm can take the opportunity to examine a reworking of your business processes to make them more efficient and effective. An example of this is asking yourself: how can we improve the billing process? Think about how you can make your systems better and faster by eliminating old outdated ways of working and take advantage of the new technologies in the office. A good consultant who has taken law firms down this path can be worth their weight in gold as they will guide you in the software, hardware and processes best suited to implementing change in your firm.
Training the Right Way
Make sure that training is part of the time commitment and strategy. Work with the vendor to get options on training. Will it be one on one? Group? Recorded? Personalized? Each user may learn in a unique way. Identify “super users” on the team and get them the training from the vendor. These super users can then help train the rest of the team and contextualize the training. A large group of users who all have different daily duties being forced to go through a generic training, especially in advance of the product roll out, will ensure frustration and resistance. The super users can also document the processes so that people can “self-help” from your firm’s own knowledgebase.
Celebrate the Successes and Acknowledge Setbacks
Every project has its milestones, setbacks, and successes. By positively communicating your successes you help keep the momentum going and the change process positive. You also need to have strategies in place to deal with the setbacks to avoid having your project derailed by the naysayers. Keep the energy going and avoid feeding the resisters who will be looking for the evidence that their positions against the change were valid. Better to be honest and acknowledge that the promised land is still the goal and still achievable but taking a bit longer than expected than to give in and give up.
Be honest in your reporting on the progress of the project. People can see thru a smokescreen; if you are honest in your news then people will recognize that accomplishing any change requires time and effort and any project will suffer setbacks from time to time. You will accomplish more by being forthright rather than by sugarcoating setbacks and alienating those who would otherwise jump on board.
Learn and Adapt
Every successful change management process lays the groundwork for the next. Learn how to gather the “take-aways” that form the institutional learning for future growth. This is known as transforming your law firm into a ‘learning’ organization that is better adapted at dealing with change.
Leading the successful push to adopt new technology will help bring about the transformation of your law firm to adopt change as being necessary to carry on in today’s business environment. You have helped the organization move forward; be sure to take the time to capture how this was done (knowledge capture) to ensure that you are better equipped to bring about the next change initiative (tacit knowledge management).
Accordingly, after each goal accomplishment, hold a short meeting whose focus is to learn from the prior work. What worked? What didn’t? Why? How can we do it better next time? Setbacks offer lessons too. Learn from your mistakes to avoid repeating them.
Special thanks to David Bilinsky for collaboration and help with previous iterations of change management articles!