A Change Management Experience

My best change management experience came from a project for healthcare client which grew rapidly in recent past and wanted cognizant to help them setup their IT practice. Due to rapid growth in multiple departments, the organization was not organized about the effort and each department had their own siloed IT practice to help them with day to day activities.

Thus, the task was to change the completely unorganized and unitary IT practices into one centralized cost center. 

The major goals for this project was to

• Educate IT sub groups about the change to be made.
• Execute the change management process in efficient and time bound manner.
• Ensuring continuity of operations in future.

My first actionable item on this project was to collate data. I formed small teams of 2-3 consultants and assigned them to each of the IT sub group that existed in the organization. The team job was to gather all information about their operation and the present their analysis on how they can be mutually collaborated.

Once we were clear about our action steps to unify these sub groups, I worked with eac of the group and made them aware about how we are going to affect this change. This helped in clearing any inhibitions and create a sense of transparency among the client team.

The sub group teams were made part of all activities like development, implementation and validation. Constant feedback sessions were arranged with all stake holders and changes were implemented according the feedback received. Process were cross verified with older results and were calibrated to deliver the expected results. Processes were documented, and knowledge repository was created in case they need any guidance.

Finally train the trainer sessions were held to train an internal designate in every area so that she can cascade the information in the organization.

Thus, a methodical approached helped me deal with a organization change in an efficient way. It helped my customer to be organized and save unnecessary cost of managing multiple cost centre. As activities were centralized and redundancy of operations was reduced, this change resulted into increase in ROI for the IT expenditures by 7%. This also allowed customer to implement department level best practices organization wide.