Seven Change Management Levers
No matter the exact implementation approach (“greenfield” vs. “brownfield”, moving from a SAP or non-SAP product, cloud vs. on-premises — see figure above), the following seven interventions are crucial to achieving persona-led transformation and maximizing returns on ERP investment.
- Align leaders across the entire business. S/4HANA implementation is typically led by particular lines of business, such as supply chain and finance, but wider business leaders must be on board as well. To support the long implementation timeline, a robust organizational change management approach will insist on a regular drumbeat of engagement with senior leaders to improve leadership commitment and alignment and equip leaders to actively sponsor and lead the change.
- Engage GPOs early to drive the change. It may not be immediately apparent that Global Process Owners (GPOs) need to be intimately involved in the early stages of S/4HANA implementation. However, because they are the bridge between the high-level strategy and the on-the-ground reality, their early input and mobilization is critical. As they consider how a new ERP system will impact processes and frontline teams, GPOs are ideally positioned to both envision the future and lead people toward that future state. Change leaders need to ensure that early onboarding provides GPOs with a crystal-clear picture of S/4HANA processes and capabilities.
- Assess business impact. Business impact assessments help leaders model the impact of the change on functional teams like finance and supply chain, on third parties, and on the leaders themselves. These assessments surface needs for additional communications and training, and should be conducted at a high level of granularity in order to develop change management interventions for each user persona. Business impact assessments should be frequent and iterative, as the intelligence derived from the impact assessments will evolve as the system design unfolds.
- Emphasize integrated planning.To de-risk S/4HANA implementation, change management activities need to be aligned with the SAP Activate methodology, which ensures tight integration of activities into the overall plan, including clearly articulated and managed dependencies and risks. As process and system design evolves, the change team should stay abreast of changes and their implications on people through a seat on the Design Authority (the body program responsible for managing continuous updates). Finally, there should be a close partnership with HR representatives to ensure that HR manages the implications of job role changes and that change management plans adhere to legal frameworks and consultation milestones.
- Cultivate a change community. Change leaders can stand up a community of influencers to drive the change locally (in both a regional and organizational sense) and infuse change into the core of the enterprise. A change community is a network of influencers that creates a forum for disseminating messages and getting feedback from the wider business. It should include both geographic and functional representation of well-networked individuals who are able to influence peers and translate the change in a way that is meaningful on the ground.
- Deploy readiness and adoption measurements.Change leaders need to periodically measure the people side of business readiness prior to go-live. Feedback surveys, training completion rates and evaluations, and stakeholder interviews can give leaders a qualitative and quantitative picture of readiness. Post go-live, feedback surveys, system adoption metrics and helpdesk query analysis will capture how well the organization is adapting to the change, and surface opportunities to course correct where necessary.
- Socialize the change with learning and development. A formal learning and development (L&D) program should accompany any S/4HANA implementation. Persona-based training curriculum (both classroom and digital) mapped to individual learning pathways will reduce cognitive overload on end users and prepare them for go-live, and tools like Articulate, Powtoon and Captivate can ensure that courses are gamified, engaging and interactive. Meanwhile, SAP’s Enable Now platform can facilitate hands-on practice while avoiding the costs of creating and maintaining a dedicated training environment.
The through-line of these change-management activities is an emphasis on modeling and understanding user journeys. Throughout the implementation exercise, change leaders should refer to user journey models as they seek to understand the state of adoption across roles and functions. By focusing on the unique stumbling blocks for each user type, change leaders can create targeted solutions rather than falsely assume that a one-size-fits-all approach will be effective.
