Need
A medical company was replacing its product data management system and was concerned about the risk involved. The project was extremely large and complex, with 2,000 impacted employees in 15 locations worldwide.

One of the goals of the project was to achieve improvements in operational efficiency. This goal would require major changes in the way employees would think about the new technology and the way they would do their jobs.

The company was concerned that it could be operating at vastly reduced efficiency if its staff was not adequately trained and if the change was not managed effectively. Lacking the appropriate resources in house, the company called in Dashe & Thomson.

Solution
Dashe & Thomson performed an organizational readiness assessment, and provided change management and communication planning. We interviewed key stakeholders via interviews and questionnaires, performed a comprehensive assessment of risks and developed a plan to mitigate those risks.

• We developed and implemented a communication plan that included a detailed communication matrix, materials and messages, and feedback mechanisms to capture support and concern from the broad organization.
• We provided coaching and planning assistance for the creation of an Organization Readiness Task Group that would develop and communicate key messages to the entire organization.
• We provided guidelines for project training, communication, and other organizational readiness goals, and developed a role-based customized training curriculum.
• We helped to develop team charters, define the change in terms of job level details, deliver team building activities, facilitate roundtables, and assist with conference room pilots.
• We provided knowledge transfer about our change management methodology to the project manager so the organization could continue to use the principles we followed on the project.

Result
The implementation was acclaimed as the most successful go-live in the company’s history, with better informed and better trained users who were able to hit the ground running.

The company was able to:

• Minimize the lost productivity typically associated with enterprise-wide system implementations.
• Realize the value of an organizational readiness assessment and change management planning and execution.
• Embed change management in its project methodology.