As the practice of organizational change management (OCM) has continued to evolve, the recognition of the importance of executive sponsorship and end user advocacy have remained constant. Both OCM and project management best practices indicate a direct link between an active, visible sponsor and project success. Without end user adoption, the investment in a change will not be realized. As a result, organizational change management practitioners know how to engage stakeholders at the top and the bottom of the org chart really well. But what about the stakeholders in the middle, the managers and supervisors? Has the role of the manager and supervisor in the middle of the change process been overlooked?

Over the past several months our consultants have continued to provide organizational change management support to our clients – but from afar! We reached out and asked our consultants to share lessons learned from providing organizational change management support remotely.

A small utility company was rolling out mobile workforce management software to its linemen in the field. The project team had actively engaged the linemen as a key stakeholder group throughout the effort: they had collaborated with the linemen regarding how they would leverage the new system, they had actively listened to their feedback, and had worked to overcome their concerns. But heading into go live, resistance from the linemen to the new software was not only fierce but also at an all-time high. Hadn’t the project team done everything right? How had it gone so wrong?

The field of organizational change management (OCM) has made great strides in demonstrating the value of engaging OCM resources as soon as an organization commits to a significant change. Despite this progress, the organizational change management team (OCM), which includes learning and development resources, often walks into an already baked project schedule. The outcome is a planning process and system implementation timeline that did not adequately account for the education effort required to get people on board.

As part of a larger grid modernization effort, our client, a Fortune 500 utility company, recently implemented Salesforce. ChangeStaffing was engaged to augment the organizational change management (OCM) team provided by the system integrator. We recently sat down with one of our consultants, Robin Mitts, to discuss the change management lessons learned.