Year: 2014

Advocating change in any organization is a daunting process. A major hurdle for every change initiative is overcoming resistance. Your idea could be sound backed up by solid facts and figures, but you are still likely to encounter resistance. No matter how beneficial your change is, you’ll have to get around the “corporate immune system”. As can the immune system in our bodies, the corporate immune system can squelch things that are outside the “normal” way of doing things.

Once you have established a solid foundation for your change initiative, it is important to develop a set of strategies and tactics for overcoming the inevitable headwinds that precede meaningful improvement.

75% of organizational change programs fail because leadership didn’t create the necessary groundswell of support among employees.
(pwc.com: How to Build and Agile Foundation for Change)

Here are four strategies for preparing for and overcoming resistance:

Balance your coalition with people from all angles of the problem

The common element that will bring your coalition together is the problem that needs changing. If you’ve seen a need for process change, there is no doubt that this need for change has firmly rooted itself inside and across cross-functional teams. Form your coalition from all angles of the organization, from different departmental perspectives. For example, there may be strategic concerns in addition to tactical when dealing with an inefficient process. Colleagues working behind the scenes will view the problem differently than the sales team. If you have identified how the problem affects people at all levels of the organization, and have built your coalition to reflect those varied perspectives, you are more likely to get buy-in. The added benefit of a diverse coalition is that when it comes time to sell the initiative to the larger organization, you will have already addressed a variety of perspectives, including those of your resisters.

Present an emotionally compelling case for change

Change can be difficult for people. Although your case for change has a solid foundation of facts and data, don’t discount the human, emotional component. The inefficient process you want to change may cost your company money, but it also causes undue frustration and wasted time on the part of the people involved in the process. Present not only facts and figures, but convey how the improved workflow will help them be happier and more successful in their jobs.

Analyze organizational factors that can help or hinder your change initiative.

In “Choosing Strategies for Change,” from the Harvard Business Review, John Kotter and Leonard Schlesinger recommend asking the following questions when preparing for potential resistance:

• How urgently does your organization need this change?
• How powerful is your coalition in relation to resisters?

The strategy for your organization-wide persuasion tour will revolve around these two questions. If the change you are advocating for is extremely urgent and your coalition is more powerful than your potential resisters, it is full steam ahead. When the polar opposite is true, you’ll need to proceed more delicately. If the change is urgent, but your coalition is less powerful than the resistance, it might be helpful to bolster your coalition with a member of the leadership team. By analyzing and anticipating these factors, you can better prepare your coalition for the necessary selling-in process. You can also set more realistic expectations when it comes to change deployment.

Put tools in place to mitigate ongoing resistance

Just because you’ve sold your idea for change, and the larger organization is on board, your job as change-agent is not done. Kotter and Schlesinger recommend implementing tools to help manage ongoing resistance. Consider an infrastructure that will enable education, skills training, support and the offering of incentives. No matter how good a job your coalition did at convincing the company to embrace the change, success of the initiative hinges on a support infrastructure. Getting to the stage of being able to deploy the process change is the first step, but having people use the improved process in their daily jobs is the key to long-term success.

Onit can help you be an agent for change. Now that you have strategies for overcoming resistance learn more about embarking on your first change initiative. Download our whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

The key to your first successful change initiative is picking the right process to target for improvement. Although you probably witness an abundance of everyday inefficiencies in your job, you want to start by selecting a process that will allow you to celebrate a quick win. Choosing a process that is central to driving your business is important, but it does not have to be a large, unwieldy process. Don’t overlook small business processes as they can have a big impact. Look for repeatable projects. When there’s repetition present, there’s always an opportunity to create or improve a formal process around it!

To help you choose the right project for your initiative, here are five telltale signs that a process is ripe for change.

#1 – A Project Lacks Visibility & Transparency

Do you find yourself or your team spending inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out the status of the project? Do you have a maze of steps and gatekeepers to go through to gain valuable insight such as the budget or who’s responsible for what? You are not alone. It can be difficult to attain critical information related to contracts and near impossible to run reports on those contracts. Other examples of a lack of visibility or transparency in a project might involve a team member having to email the whole group to find out where a contract is in its lifecycle, or the budget runs over because the latest budget document wasn’t updated correctly.

#2 – Simple Projects Take Too Long

Do standard contracts, such as NDAs, take days rather than hours or minutes to complete? When simple contract workflows get mired in administrative pileups, this can cause larger project delays or prevent projects from getting off the ground in the first place. In many organizations, it takes more than two days to execute a standard NDA. Wrangling the various interested parties can be a struggle, with many teams involving 5 or more people in the administration of a typical contract.

#3 – Project Inefficiencies Cause Missed Deadlines or Opportunities

Another key trait of an ineffective process is that teams miss deadlines, or can’t capitalize on quick-turnaround opportunities. It could be simply not receiving client feedback in a timely manner in order to respond and turn an adverse situation into a sales opportunity. Alternatively, perhaps your marketing team is unable to capitalize on a key promotion opportunity because it cannot wrangle outside vendors in time. It could mean that the lack of a defined set of steps necessitates that your sales team has to “go with their gut,” leaving valuable revenue on the table. Either through a lack of visible information or intelligence or delays caused by inefficiencies, teams that cannot execute deliverables to their full potential are in need of business process improvements.

#4 – Critical Project Paperwork Goes MIA

Contract administration is a crucial function, but the storage and retrieval piece is often neglected. It does not become a problem, until the unthinkable happens – an NDA cannot be located and produced to diffuse a precarious situation. This leaves your company vulnerable. For many companies, contracts are left to languish on a shared drive buried in a labyrinth folder system. At the opposite end of this spectrum, companies might have more than one contract repository (some with over 10+!) making it very challenging to find an executed contract on demand. With these situations, it is a wonder that anyone can find an executed contract when they need it!

#5 – Spreadsheets are Still Your Go-To Project Tracking Method

If your tracking system is a series of spreadsheets with various users contributing or accessing pertinent information, your project is ripe for an overhaul. No matter how sophisticated the pivot table, or how interactive your Google doc seems, spreadsheets do not give you a real-time, all-encompassing view of the project and its status. Because spreadsheets are dependent on the users adding information, your project tracking is only as organized and accurate as your team members. Teams consist of humans, and humans make mistakes. Why leave that up to chance when there is a better way to track projects and deliverables?

Inspired to improve a process that suffers from one or more of these qualities? Onit can help you be a change agent for your organization. Download our whitepaper, Your First Enterprise App: 6 Ways to Successfully Implement Change in Your Company.

First things first: What exactly is an “intrapreneur?” While the concept comes up frequently in Eric Reis’ recent book The Lean Startup, the term itself has been part of business vernacular for decades. Its definition is simple – an intrapreneur is “a manager within a company who promotes innovative product development and marketing.”

Even in 1992 this wasn’t a new concept, it simply gave a name to something that had been at the heart of business innovation for decades. To this day, intrapraneurs are everywhere in business. Whether a part of a sales and marketing team or a back-office legal department, intrapraneurs are constantly challenging the status quo and driving new ideas that help your business grow.

I know what you must be thinking at this point – Isn’t promotion of innovative ideas just part of the job? Shouldn’t all sales managers already be striving to grow the business? What makes an intrapreneur so special? What sets them apart?

The key to making a lasting impact as an intrapraneur is in understanding that process and workflow are at the heart of innovation.

Unfortunately, innovation and growth can be challenged by inadequate software used to manage process – like email and spreadsheets – and a lack of sufficient visibility into the process.

If you were to ask an intrapraneur if they are making their program or business process better, they most likely would say yes. But if you follow up by asking them, “How do you know?” – you might get some interestingly vague responses.

In this blog post, we hope to give you some ideas on how to innovate despite corporate IT and inadequate software tools and overcome uncertainty in process improvement.

Lean Startup Principles and Smart Process Apps Make Innovation Easy

Here are three guidelines from Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup that might help your company get started:

1.    Establish a Baseline with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

The first step towards that next ground-breaking business idea is to establish a baseline of data around how your users, whether they are the company’s customers or an army of sales reps, will actually perform your process.

This is where Onit can help.

Onit will build you a MVP within a matter of hours or days that you can get in the hands of your customers to see how they perform with your product.

2.    Tune the Baseline Toward the Ideal

Now that you have an Onit App or two that your customers are using, you can begin to fine-tune the system.

Onit automatically records every action a user takes when they are using your Apps. That means you can extract the data to analyze on your own, or Onit can build you amazing reporting dashboards to help you stay on top of your processes.

The detailed reporting capabilities will allow you to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies standing in the way of innovation. By carefully analyzing these bottlenecks, you can make the executive decision to change aspects of the process. Perhaps that API call to Salesforce.com should execute before it gets to the legal team, or maybe the VP of Sales should review that contract before it makes it to the team in India.

When you have the ability to rapidly iterate on your design, you can quickly refine your process to be efficient and effective – even if it wasn’t at first.

3.    Pivot or Persevere

After a sufficiently long period of execution with your App, you’ll have lots of data and analyses on how your business could work. You’ll have insights that simply weren’t possible before.

With this information, you can make a clear decision on whether to continue scaling and building on your idea or to pivot to another one altogether.

If you decide to pivot, Onit licenses by the process, so it is very easy to switch to a totally different design without significantly affecting your cost.

Execution is All That Matters

Whether you are a Silicon Valley startup or a Fortune 100, execution is all that matters. You can have the best idea in the world for your business, but unless you make it happen and measure the results, you’ll never make an impact.

Onit is here to help you do just that.

We believe that process and workflow are the most important ingredients in business and we know a good deal about lean startup process improvement because we are a startup ourselves.

Email us today at [email protected] to start a conversation with one of our business process consultants. We will help you refine the design of your process and build your minimum viable product Apps to establish your baseline.

With the Onit Team and Smart Process Apps on your side, you can pave the way for all the intrapreneurs within your company to take your business to the next level.