Before lunch, Paula Smith the records manager at Pharmac presented on Effective Follow Through and Management of your Systems Post Roll-out. On reflection, it appears that this presentation was a broad and general analysis (eg, wisdom to embrace drawn from many projects that Paula has been involved with), not a specific case study on Pharmac.
Key question: how do you set the expectations with users and management? Need to set (and document) the expectations early on.
What's "change management"?
- "a structured approach to the change in individuals, teams, organizations and societies that enables the transition from a current state to a desired future state"
- or "getting users to come around to my way of thinking"
- ... both can be helpful ... you just need to know what one applies for a given organization and project.
- drive the implementation of new technology (eg, EDRMS) from a business perspective. Why are you doing this? What's the desired outcome?
Costs and effort:
- in the UK, if the hardware and software is $1 million, there will be $3 million of change management cost.
- Eg, setting up the support processes in IT, training the records managers
Various approaches to implementation:
- (a) "it's a black box ... turn it on already"
- (b) "we need a perfect information architecture"
- (c) "let's copy someone else's"
- (d) "it may take us 5 years, but we will do it properly"
- (e) "what decision did we make last week - let's change it"
- ... any of these can be okay, but everyone needs to agree which one is happening.
Expect to see people going through the 5 phases of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance
Breeding success ... how does the team define success? Cost savings? Risk reduction? Compliance? System use? Business improvement? Capital spent? Satisfy workers? Reduced duplication?
- you need to know this, in order to tick it off?
Biggest reason why systems fail ... end user rejection. No matter how much you lock things down, they will get around it.
- Need to consult with end users ... to learn from them, to hear their views, do not need to embrace everything
Opportunities and risks:
- get all your ducks in a row.
- get the money sorted.
- wave the flag. Translate the ideas of records management back to the language that end users use and the worldview in which they live.
- get your feet wet ... be involved.
- go and see what's happening in the business.
The top 5 critical success factors:
- THIS IS NOT A PROJECT!
- find the people with true commitment
- ongoing investment in change management. How do we prevent problems from happening again?
- "after action reviews" ... how can we make things better?
- senior executives that will give strategy direction and then get out of the way to let the records manager get on with making the system work.
"Training is like planning: you pay for it whether you do it or not."
- need to make it easy for them.
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