10 tips to conquer organisational change hurdles

The technical implementation of SAP may not always be perfect, but it is now very well practiced and often seamless. So why wouldn’t your SAP implementation be a resounding success? To thrive with SAP, a business must make the implementation about their people, not just the technology, as Sarah Arnold from our partner company Articulate explains.

System implementations gain strong support for the technical preparation of a business, with professional services such as analysis, configuration, architecture, integration, data migration and testing seen as a prerequisite.

The preparation of personnel often lacks an equivalent level of support and investment.

For successful adoption of SAP, the business should: have

• ‘change leaders’ (both formal and informal) who support SAP and actively promote it amongst their personnel.
• Ensure all staff in the organisation understand the value SAP will add to their organisation and are excited about  being made more productive by SAP.
• Make highly relevant and sustainable learning products accessible with practical business process and scenario context.
• Enable users to competently and confidently use the system to perform their daily duties.
• Encourage personnel to actively find ways to improve the way their organisation works with SAP.
• Have local champions or super users in place to provide peer support and answer difficult ‘how to’ questions.

In order to reach this ideal state, the following business adoption factors are essential:

1. Your people make technology successful Acknowledge that your people’s ability and desire to use new technology enables its success. Become people focused and not just technology-focused. Obtain sponsorship from management and establish a budget for the preparation of your personnel for the introduction of
   SAP. Business adoption can cost between 10 and 20 per cent of an implementation budget. 
2. Pervasive business engagement Engage your people top-down and bottom-up. Developa message that focuses on the outcomes for your people and deliver it consistently. Business engagement should be continuous, sincere, and not simply a milestone in a plan. 
3. Invite participation and generate interest Develop a participative climate with your organisation to encourage interest and involvement. This can help to foster acceptance and ownership of SAP. This can also be a medium for personnel to highlight concerns and challenges, which can focus effort in a timely fashion and
   ultimately result in the right solution for your business. 
4. Capitalise on best practice and experience Participate in user groups to capitalise on best practice and other’s experience. It is commonplace to adopt technical lessons learned, but there is a wealth of business adoption lessons that should also be considered. Think about what worked well in the past and leverage those
   experiences.
5. Consider an effective partnership early Obtain early input into your SAP implementation from a specialist who can help you formulate a business adoption strategy as part of Project Preparation or Business Blueprint. Collaborate with them so that a strategy that closely reflects the vision and goal of your business is
   devised. This strategy will give you a clear understanding of how and when to prepare your people for SAP. The result is a realistic, cost-effective and pragmatic change management and training program. 
6. Subject experts make information relevant Leverage your business subject matter experts. They have the skill and influence of peer leadership amongst your teams and can provide invaluable input to business adoption activities. They have deep insight into the extent of the change and how it will affect daily operations. They
   have access to resources that can make the difference when creating a change management and training program which is meaningful and relevant to your organisation. The key is to commit some of their time each week to supporting the change management and training efforts by developing a realistic resource plan. 
7. Resource change and training just-intime Adopt a just-in-time resourcing approach for change management and training activities to ensure your budget survives project duration. The business adoption strategy will still need to be formulated early by a change and training manager and integrated with the overall project plan, but their team can be judiciously mobilised to suit scope, project timelines and desired outcome.
8. Focus on the business, not the system Process and role-focused learning, rather than systemfocusedlearning, is critical to the success of any SAP implementation. System-based training, in the form of procedural instructions, can be embedded in a business process framework to provide real-life context. This context enhances user adoption and reduces the time to competency. 
9. Make information easily consumable Training and performance support material is most effective when accessed just enough, just in time and just for each role. Consumable modules of learning content can be effectively delivered in a blend of face-to-face and self-paced modes. Modular electronic materials are reused for both modes and can be accessed through contextsensitive help while the user is actually performing an SAP transaction.
10. Provide operational performance support Commit to ongoing end user performance support for sustainability. Successful implementations maintain training, coaching and performance support throughout a complete business cycle. This support can be delivered by an extended project team, or by super users set up in a business-as-usual support team. Change management and training initiatives have a significant level of influence in the process of user uptake and acceptance. Addressing these business adoption factors with an experienced change management and training partner enables organisations to not only survive an implementation, but to thrive with SAP.

About the author

Sarah Arnold is the ERP practice director at Articulate (www.articulate.com.au). She was voted number 6 in InsideSAP’s Top 10 Most Influential People in SAP for 2010, and specialises in helping clients apply Articulate’s proven change management and training methodologies to meet their business adoption outcomes.

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