Guest Author: Deb Miller
Global 360 Inc.

For those of us who consider ourselves lucky to have a Golden Retriever in our lives (apparently 98% of Boulder, Colorado), the term backslide instantly resonates.  GRs are infamous for being super responsive to behavior change, meeting and exceeding our expectations in obedience, agility and tracking.  Then, over time, they backslide to their previous erratic behaviors.  Backslide is exactly what can happen with your business change efforts. 

If you don’t pay attention to making change stick, the advantages you’ve gained from process improvement initiatives like BPM (business process management) will disappear.  In a recent Blog entry, Gartner’s Jim Sinur talks about Elastic Behavior: The Bane of BPM:

“It is sometimes difficult to change behavior. BPM causes people to have to change the way they do their work and behave. One of the dangers of BPM is to develop a cost cutting and even innovative process that works for a while and snaps back to traditional behavior… Sometimes this is because the process needs to get better, but often it is just resistance to change.’

So how do you make change stick and avoid backslide? Here are a couple user-centric ideas that have been successful for me:

• Put a CAP on it to engage users for change.  CAP – Change Acceleration Process – is a discipline I used extensively at General Electric to drive operational efficiency and productivity improvements in the business.  User process acceptance is one of the fundamental principles underlying CAP. CAP is focused on overcoming resistance to change and increasing the success of change efforts by emphasizing not just the quality of the technical solution, but also the role that stakeholders play in process change. CAP centers on the need to consider how people will embrace, accept and adopt change resulting from your process improvement efforts.  I recommend checking it out and using it in conjunction with your chosen process improvement methodology.

• Use the familiar to make change stick.  Being user-centric and attuned to user behaviors enables faster time to business value with change that is also sustainable. I’ve found that use of a familiar interface like SharePoint and surrounding it with an intuitive experience can significantly help to engage users and speed adoption.  And, a good way to make change stick is by creating an interface that delivers content within the context of the work that is done every day.  When you get the user-centric emphasis right, the results can be outstanding.

One of my favorite examples is Irish Life, one of Ireland’s largest and most successful financial organizations. Irish Life faced excessive turnaround times managing over half a million policies. There was no visibility of where work was in the process and the number one customer complaint was response time. Irish Life’s BPM solution removed paper from its processes and integrated the policy and supporting documents into the process flow, resulting in improved customer turnaround time and consistency, management visibility into all work statuses, and a 35 percent improvement in productivity.  In order to accomplish these improvements, Irish Life included their process participants and stakeholders in the improvement initiative. By focusing on the user, Irish Life changed “how the work gets done.” In effect, they improved the worker experience, rather than merely adding speed to old and potentially ineffective ways of working or worse yet, changing the work without regard to the user view. From a people perspective, the system has made a huge impact. Employees have recognized and embraced the improvements being driven by the BPM solution, and to date no backslide is evident.

I’d like to hear your experiences around use of the familiar to accelerate adoption of process change.  Have you been involved in using SharePoint to help drive process improvement changes? What techniques have proven successful for you in making change stick?

And BTW, if you have any tips for avoiding backslide with Goldens, I’d really like to hear about that too.

Guest Author: Deb Miller
Global 360 Inc.

Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360. Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and at @DebsG360 on Twitter.