Overview
- Sabya Mitra
Change management and SuccessFactors
Cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are highly disruptive forces that can help organizations transform their HR operations and achieve more significant business impacts. It is crucial to understand the implications of cloud computing and the role of change management in this new world so that you can make informed decisions and leverage your investment. In this blog, I will try to explain my thoughts, experience, and understanding of change management and its impact on SuccessFactors.
SuccessFactors is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that enables the HR function to cost-effectively integrate processes, improve operations, and standardize technology globally to achieve greater business agility. It is essential to understand the impact of change management in making the system adaptable for all.
What are the key benefits of adopting SuccessFactors?
SuccessFactors with Core HR (Employee Central), Talent Management, Learning, and Workforce Analytics allows HR and business users to have a holistic view of the company and its workforce, which helps them make the right decisions for the right set of individuals at the right time. A greater user experience allows enhanced adaptability, which in turn increases the productivity of employees. Companies that use SuccessFactors for all their processes can have consistent processes for hiring, learning, succession, and performance management across the entire company. For senior management, this allows better availability of information, reporting, and actionable analytics for smarter decision-making.
Companies migrating to cloud-based products like SuccessFactors are mainly moving away from their decade-old ERP, homegrown, or off-the-shelf systems. Moving to the cloud makes the HR and IT departments leaner and helps them focus more on strategic tasks than administrative tasks. Take performance management as a case in point: earlier, HR and IT spent more time and effort on building the solution and less on its adaptability and success. Now with cloud solutions, they can focus on how to make it useful through a series of steps within the organization. The organization, as an entity, becomes more nimble and flexible.
Organizational service delivery mainly consists of centers of excellence, employee service centers, and HR business partners. SuccessFactors, with its intuitive product design, intelligent services, and workflows, makes the integration of all the service delivery processes seamless. It also helps shift many responsibilities through ESS, MSS, and the employee service center to employees, managers, or service center agents. Hence there is less administrative work on HR, and the dream of an inverted pyramid looks real.
Finally, no software can make HR strategic, but it does free up HR time so they can actively look at things that are more strategic in nature. This could be an excellent beginning for most organizations in the right direction.
Why is change management a crucial part of a SuccessFactors implementation?
Gartner studies indicate that 70 percent of IT implementations fail, and cloud migration assessments indicate that overcoming an organization’s cultural barriers is a frequent challenge. It is fascinating that the same solution is a big success in one organization and a massive failure in another. Sometimes it is tough to pinpoint what went right and what went wrong.
One significant difference in cloud projects is that you are moving away from your current processes and adapting to the best-practice solution offered by your vendor — SuccessFactors, in this case. That difference creates a massive requirement for active change management to help organizations adapt to the processes offered by the cloud product.
The change management plan enables HR to secure stakeholder buy-in and clarify everybody’s roles and responsibilities throughout the change process — from the SuccessFactors implementation to its adoption and beyond. A few areas you need to take care of:
- A clear communication strategy to explain to everybody why you’re moving away from your current situation to SuccessFactors. Surprise is the one thing most employees will not like.
- Articulate how SuccessFactors will help the organization and how the change aligns with overall business objectives.
- The cloud touches every employee in some way; role changes have to be articulated positively well before training starts. You will see a spike of service tickets in the initial months post-implementation, but with effective change management it stabilizes to an acceptable number.
- Be prepared for post-implementation upgrades twice a year, which bring many changes and innovations. Change management and communication is a continuous process.
Identify the change management challenge you would face in your organization
A “one-size-fits-all” change management approach does not achieve organizational change in SuccessFactors implementations. Every organization is different, and their challenges are very different from each other. Culture plays a significant role in deciding how much effort will be required for the right kind of cloud adaptability.
One must understand that SuccessFactors isn’t a turnkey solution. Just like any other software, it demands a process and talent framework, data migration, integration, testing, training, and support — even though the nature of many of these is very different in the cloud. One of the worst things that can happen is that you put all this time, energy, and effort into implementing SuccessFactors, and then utilization is low.
If you have never conducted an HCM Health check in your organization, that is the first thing to start with. It tells you where the organization stands today on essential dimensions like Strategy, People, Process, Service Delivery, Organization Structure, and Technology — and where it wants to go. Follow it with an organization-wide Design Thinking session to understand the most crucial factor in user adaptability: the user. In the end, success depends not on what the software does, but on what the user does.
Design Thinking approach
To be successful, you need an effective change management process, and to have one you need to understand the needs of your employees. Design thinking can help in that regard. We should always remember that “technology changes; humans don’t.”
A practical change management approach for SuccessFactors implementations
The approach you take depends on various factors, and what worked for one company may or may not work for you. But there are general rules all organizations can follow. The approach we recommend is a methodology interconnected with SAP’s Activate methodology for SuccessFactors implementation; this gives an integrated plan for both change management and the implementation.
Change management approach for SuccessFactors projects
Strong sponsors and leadership are essential for organizations to realize the benefits of cloud solutions. Leadership support should be definite and visible to the entire organization. Create superusers or solution champions; train them well, make them understand their role clearly, and you have a group of leaders who can advocate the advantages of the program during and even after implementation. They can help with intelligent troubleshooting and assist in navigation each time a quarterly upgrade is introduced.
SuccessFactors follows the approach of “start anywhere and go everywhere,” which means not everything is implemented at the same time or for the entire organization at once. That gives the organization the ability to deploy the right solution for the right set of people. During the design phase, it is crucial to get everyone’s perspective on issues that could affect them — and for change management to succeed, people need to know their point of view is considered even if they are not going to use the system right away. The last thing people should feel is that the initiative is being thrust upon them.
Training remains one of the most crucial ingredients for change management success
Training is where adoption is won or lost. Plan it around real roles and personas, deliver it close to go-live, and keep reinforcing it through each upgrade so the new ways of working become the normal ways of working.