3 Steps to Help Your Customer Adopt the Change of Your Project
The purpose of this blog article is to cover Adoption which is helping people successfully integrate the changes introduced by the project into their personal ways of operating. Adoption is under the LEAD part and under People in the Project Management MPM model.
Adoption is under the LEAD part and under People
Adoption is about the Personal Impacts of Project Change
Projects affect change, as we’ve established and discussed in the INITIATE article.
Inevitably this also means that it affects business processes – people’s individual ways of working. It affects people personally.
Change management is a term that is used in a number of ways on a project. It can mean managing many aspects of the official project plan, including scope, schedule, costs, resources, and any other changes to the approved plan. It can also refer to managing changes to the project the production environment.
Here we are using the term to refer to helping end users of the project deliverables cope with and integrate the new aspects, introduced by the project, into their daily routines, to inculcate a new way of doing things.
To differentiate this type of change management from other types we use the term Adoption. Learning new habits and routines introduced by the project essentially requires adoption by the people who are affected by the project in order to minimize the disruption and the expected drop in productivity that comes from learning new ways of doing things.
Adoption is an integral part of any project, and the importance of this cannot be overstated: if you want to make sure that your project work doesn’t have to be repeated later, make sure Adoption is done right.
If you ignore adoption or minimize it, everything can unravel back to a disordered state over time, mimicking a natural and well-documented process termed “entropy”.
Step 1: Appreciate the Impacts of Change
David Viney created a model of change’s impact on staff productivity and time – essentially showing a graphic representation of the learning curve that your end customer experiences after the change that your project creates.
The J Curve effect observed in change (David Viney)
It demonstrates why change management or adoption is so important: without proper adoption, the movement towards your desired future state will be far more gradual and impactful, disappointing staff and stakeholder expectations along the way.
Let’s dig into the diagram a bit: before your project, you’re at a current, steady state. You start your project because you want to get to the optimized future state indicated by the end point on the right side of the diagram. That might involve installing a new system, improving a process, or developing a new product or service.
In the vehicle purchase project we’ve woven into a number of articles and blogs, your vehicle gives you several quality-of-life improvements: more reliable transportation, lower maintenance costs, and better state of mind.
When you talk to your stakeholders and tell them about the project, they’re going to develop a certain set of expectations.
They might assume that they won’t have a learning curve when it comes to the car. Maybe your new car is a stick shift instead of an automatic, electric instead of gas-powered, or it has a new and improved input screen for navigation and radio settings.
Your car friend, the next time you give them a ride, might expect you to have the settings figured out next time you see them. Maybe you’ll expect yourself to, as well. If you don’t, you might both be confused looking for a feature you need, even leading to a bit of frustration.
That’s a trivial example, but it gets the point across – usually when talking about a project, we motivate ourselves at the prospect of an intense effort by glossing over the change and envisioning the rosiness of the ideal future state; almost purposely ignoring the impact the change will have.
The issue is that this avoids thinking about the learning curve. Adoption will help to manage that learning curve.
It is too easy to gloss over the impacts of change to the end customer
If you look again at the diagram, there are three lines – one (black) that shows stakeholder (and end customer) expectations of how easy and smooth the post-project transition might be and instant increase in productive from day one.
One line (red) shows what it’s like without proper adoption education and assistance; which includes “bad” or poor adoption with mistakes and misinformation; resulting in a longer period of lesser productivity and probably a lot of frustration too.
One line (blue) shows what you can expect if you do strategize and include adoption efforts in your project and honor and respect how integrating something new into existing familiar personal ways of doing things takes time.
The blue arrow points to what happens when you have adoption tools in place. For example, going back to your vehicle purchase project, you set aside time in your schedule to learn the stereo controls or review the manual, or get someone who is familiar with the vehicle to walk you through the features of your new vehicle so you know where everything is located before you start driving and need to access critical features.
Your new way of operating includes trips to the dealership for warranty service. Even how and where you park may change.
Step 2: Understand tools to use for Adoption
To minimize the time and stress associated with the change, it’s important to acknowledge that change from a project is disruptive. Understanding and allowing time to learn through that personal disruption helps minimize its impact.
To reduce the impact of change, understand what processes or steps are being impacted by the change, document and model how they work now and how they work in the future, especially at a personal level.
Provide tools and training materials to move people from the old personal way to the new personal way. Do this for anyone who is impacted.
If the project doesn’t do it, your customers need to stumble around and learn on their own and that creates the dip in productivity shown by the red line on the chart and creates frustration with the end users.
Uncover the areas of change that need tools for adoption
Tools can include online, in-person, and pre-recorded training. Materials can include on-screen contextual, such as pop-ups, process mapping steps, step-by-step pdfs, swim-lane diagrams, flow charts.
There are a wide range and number of tools available. The important thing is to understand where the biggest gaps are and then work with those end user teams to understand how best they would like training to help them adopt the new way of working and get through the period of disruption.
Step 3: Uncover gap areas that need tools for Adoption
The steps to handle all of the project changes then are:
- Identify a process that is going to change due to your project.
- List the Steps currently being done for that process or do an as-is process modelling swim-lane diagram. If you are not familiar with these, they are covered in the workshop.
- List the Steps for how the process steps are going to be accomplished after the project is done, the to-be model. List any templates or other documents that are also changing.
- Now examine the gaps and what’s new. List the roles, and people, if that helps, that are impacted and describe the differences between the old and new way, and how each change is going to be explained or what training is going to be provided to the user community, so they understand how to move from the old way of operating to the new way.
It is important to also consider timing. Is the change experienced all on one day? Or does it start when something new enters the process, but the old way is used for anything currently in the middle of the process? Is the change phased in or all at once?
Summary
Projects bring change. To minimize the time and stress associated with the change, it’s important to acknowledge that change from a project is disruptive.
To reduce the impact of change, understand what processes or steps are being impacted by the change, document and model how they work now and how they work in the future, especially at a personal level.
Provide tools and training materials to move people from the old personal way to the new personal way.
Action Steps / Apply This Knowledge
- Identify at least one process that is going to change due to your project.
- List the Steps currently being done for that process.
- List the Steps for how the process steps are going to be accomplished after the project is done.
- Identify the areas of gap, the difference between the old and new way
- List the roles or people that are impacted and describe the delta between the old and new way, and then beside each gap identify how each change is going to be explained or what training is going to be provided to the users.
- Read David Viney’s post on change for additional ideas.
- Prompt engineering guidance for GPTs such as chatGPT: I’m a business leader managing a project which is delivering X, in Y timeframe, with Z dollars. What are some changes my end users will need to adopt to reduce the negative impact of change on their work routines and habits?”
Learn More to Do More
Check out the learning hub which presents other project concepts from a project knowledge awareness standpoint: https://simplepmstrategies.com/learning-hub-index
INITIATE – Change Management
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