HellerResults
Getting Them to Use It: The Critical Roles of Implementation Planning, Leadership and Change Management
Nelson B. Heller, President, HellerResults — Friday, October 28, 2011
This third article concludes our recent series on how to get customers happily and productively engaged in using the products they or their organizations have acquired. It pulls together insights from conversations with a number of senior industry executives about how their organizations work to make it happen, a top priority for customer retention and, by way of brand and reputation, new customer acquisition as well. Here, building on the two previous Heller Report columns, “Getting Them to Use It: After the Sale, Keeping Customers Happy,” and “Getting Them to Use It: Marshalling Customer Service, Social Support, Product Design and Updates, and User Incentives,” we look at the critical roles of implementation planning, leadership and change management. I think you’ll be surprised by how much effort these firms invest to pull this off. Read on to measure your own firm’s product usage promotion strategies against those of these veterans.
Implementation Planning
Enterprise-level products touch a substantial part of the customer’s organization, so getting them implemented offers a host of potential pitfalls; this can be true, too, for much less substantial products. Anticipating the customers’ needs and possible snags is the job of the implementation planners. What’s more, Tom Greaves, President of The Greaves Group, said, “Data from Project RED, about which Angus King, former Governor of Maine, said, ‘Project RED is nothing less than a blueprint for remaking American education,’ clearly shows there’s a huge gap between ordinary and proper implementation.” Fidelity accounts for a lot. Almost no schools are doing it all right for all top nine factors associated with success, and none are doing it right for all top ten. He added, “Schools often feel they can handle this and resist outside involvement, but then programs fall into disuse. Product designed to be used 30 minutes a day can’t be used 10 minutes every other day. Human nature is to cut corners, to do things your own way, and feel there’s no harm in it, but there’s harm.”
More on the importance of implementation planning was contributed by Vicki Bigham, President,Bigham Technology Solutions, who said, “I feel strongly that the implementation process begins pre-sales and goes through the product life cycle. For a client project a couple of years ago, I was hired to review and improve their documentation. It soon became clear through team interviews that best practice implementation processes were either not in place or not clearly understood. I convinced them that what they needed more than documentation was a companywide implementation process that helped individual departments understand how their colleagues in different departments were touching the customer and at what points and what each needed to do to ensure optimum usage of the product by all appropriate stakeholders in the district. This is something too many companies overlook.”
Brett Woudenberg, COO at Gaggle, a provider of safe online learning tools, including student email, told me the firm places a very high priority on implementation planning, employing certified project managers working collaboratively with customer personnel—a technology or curriculum director and maybe an assistant superintendent—to design a very granular plan with ample milestones and measures. The plan is used to set common expectations, including agreement on what measurements to use. Some districts want lots of measures and goals. Gaggle encourages staged implementation with attainable goals. Planning costs are currently priced into the product sale (typically an annual subscription fee based on the number of students). Some other firms charge separately, but Woudenberg is unsure what value the market sees in it and would rather have Gaggle absorb the costs than have a project go bad. Typically, they look at a two- to three-year implementation plan and then tail off implementation support. But when customers “fail to thrive,” indicated by poor usage and adoption, the firm creates a “re-launch” implementation plan to fix things. “Renewal and retention are priority one,” he added, “and our implementation plans always incorporate ‘internal marketing’ within schools to get teachers and administrators on-board.”
Keeping their technology user-friendly is critical to implementation. Gaggle has been “in the cloud” since at least 2000. As evidence of its power, Woudenberg said, “By now we’ve 3 billion school email messages stored, which gives us an advantage in terms of analyzable usage data .” At this level of volume, despite being a cloud service, scaling the software for fast response is a challenge, something they’ve learned to do by separating different types of content items on separate servers, “just like Amazon and the other big guys.”
Commenting on implementation planning at Knowledge Delivery Systems (KDS), Alvin Crawford, CEO, noted that every plan needs to spell out goals (including key deliverables, milestones, and escalation points), roles, necessary policy changes, incentives, and sub-plans for professional development and miscommunications. About escalation he explained, “The project manager is generally not a decision maker and often doesn’t want to be, as a job security issue. Without an escalation path, the project manager can block necessary activity (e.g., in one case creating a six-month stalemate over required data). You need a path to the top—on both the school and the vendor sides—even if the top people change. What’s more, these two folks often don’t want ‘to tell on each other’ and may be inclined ‘to hide what’s going on.’ You’ve also got to clarify roles for the program managers (usually strategic issues) versus the project managers (usually details) on both sides.”
Crawford also counsels checking out in advance the sacred cows that could down a project. In KDS’s world, a classic case involves snags with user names and passwords. The curriculum team may be casual about this, but the technology people may be very particular, and “you can find yourself with no allowance for the time and effort to resolve this. I’ve seen situations in which the kickoff and PD have already been scheduled before this all is resolved.” Make sure to include criteria for the qualifications of the schools’ own trainers, who can sometimes be sadly inadequate for the job. He’s even seen kickoff meetings occur without a key stakeholder (e.g., IT) being there.
He’s also seen situations where the computers or network a district plans to use for a newly acquired system aren’t up to the job. “Put verifying this in the implementation plan,” he says, “because if it turns up later as a problem with use of the system, the vendor will get blamed—it can get ugly and costly for both sides to find out the schools’ systems aren’t where they’re supposed to be.” Along the same lines, Tom Greaves told me, “Products sometimes don’t work because there are technical reasons clearly obvious before the sale. The vendor who doesn’t want to rock the pre-sale boat will later regret it, and bad news travels.”
With a chuckle, AlvinCrawford concluded his remarks about implementation planning, “Don’t forget the 7Ps—prior proper planning prevents piss poor payoff.”
Leadership and Change Management
There’s no doubt that getting school leadership behind a program or product is one of the key factors for success. Project RED recently identified this as one of the top factors common to the successful projects it found among the host of digital implementations it studied. In fact, according to RED data, a key correlate for success was that a senior school officer had taken change management training, especially where changes were required in staff behavior. Co-author Tom Greaves said, “In the training you have to get trainees to realize that they have to change. An oft-cited example of this from another industry is the story of the Piper Alpha oil rig fire in which the only folks who lived—who realized they had to change how they did things—broke the rule of going to a specified safety room and instead jumped overboard, at considerable risk due to the height. Schools are pretty complacent, and staff doesn’t really see a need to change. IBM’s statewide technology implementation in Virginia back in 1990-1991, when Gaston Caperton was governor, included required ‘transformational leadership’ training for every school principal in the state. Change management training ought to be a requirement for senior school leadership.”
This is the arena in which school and local politics come into play too. I asked my sources for their related advice.
For Jonathan Mann, “If administrators aren’t supporting usage, it won’t work 100%. But success needs support by parents, students, and the community too. If top leadership gives full support and wins over their staffs, that’s when everyone will learn to their full potential.”
Alvin Crawford told me, “I think that it’s about providing relevancy from leadership and continuing that throughout the project. If leadership from the top says ‘we’re doing this’ and develops the policy and cultural reasons for the adoption, adoptions happen. If there’s the perception that ‘this too shall pass,’ it creates a difficult environment. In addition, there’re really two ‘sales’ that typically take place, and this is a larger barrier in longer implementations: Sale 1: The sale of the product to the district. Sale 2: Launch of the product and the inherent cultural changes required to adopt it. If the gap between purchase and launch is long, then there’s a third sale needed at kickoff. It requires mini victories throughout to get people to stay engaged until launch. Leading Change by John P. Kotter is a great book for helping determine an approach for solving these problems.”
He was quick to add, “Change management is the larger problem. Much of this has to do with things that everyone knows should happen but don’t. We use a ‘success plan’ that recognizes you do a lot of change management to get people to buy the product, and in an enterprise sale, you often have stakeholders with dysfunctional communication between each other. Each sees only their own need—curriculum, assessment, technology, and PD. A single resistor can lead to failure. You’ve got to ‘circle the wagons’ to get everyone on-board to get the sale. Think of the school’s ‘invented here’ home-brew Filemaker project whose preservation is the only goal of a stakeholder. Another example: a stakeholder for whom all apps have to be compatible with Oracle Application Server, a costly and uncommon demand. Once the sale is completed, stakeholders may still not want the project to be successful, giving them grounds for ‘I told you so’ digs.”
“Larger districts generally realize that project management (PM) is critical; they understand that failure points may be due to lack of a project management office. In smaller districts, you need a certified project management officer. It’s critical when success depends on multiple functions, offices or departments in the organization. PM certification is available throughout the country from the Project Management Institute (PMI). A page at their website lets you confirm that a named individual is a PMI-certified project manager.”
As a part of the PM plan, Crawford said, “Aim for a small win at the kickoff meeting, such as setting some desired outcomes among the group. It might be just agreement on what they need to accomplish (a little bit of reselling) and how to get there via the project. This is just one of Kotter’s ideas from his 8-Step Change Model.”
Talking about buy-in by district leadership, Brett Woudenberg told me, “Awareness is a high priority but isn’t enough without broad acceptance across departments. We’re finding that technology solutions in education no longer easily fall within single departments, such as IT or curriculum. Endorsement by a superintendent may be helpful in getting a district to move forward with a solution, but the average tenure is short compared to departmental leadership. At Gaggle, we strive for long-term relationships, which means we place a very high level of importance on achieving an understanding of the value of our solution at all levels. With broad awareness of the benefits of using Gaggle, usage and adoption are inevitably higher.”
“Don’t forget the importance of bringing teachers into the change process,” Sandy Fivecoat said. “Teachers are joiners; they like to be part of the right groups. Look at Apple-user teacher organizations. Feeling that their career profile is advantaged by association with a brand such as Apple can be a change motivator in itself. In today’s tough jobs market for teachers, they see this as a plus. Make use of their enthusiasm by using them in podcasts and other communications to get implied testimonials.”
Good Product and Selling Aren’t Enough
In this and the preceding two Heller Report columns, we’ve seen that getting your customers to use the products you’ve sold to them is part science and part art. We’ve also seen that usage has a direct impact on customer acquisition and retention, so good product and selling aren’t enough for a viable business. It’s clear, too, that usage isn’t an accident; in fact, it’s likely the result of hard work on your part and your customers’. Hopefully the ideas shared by the industry veterans who contributed to this series will spark some useful change in the way your organization works. Next month we’ll be moving on to look at how the education market is globalizing and what that means for you.
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Welcome to the HellerResults Column
As of October 1, Dr. Nelson Heller transitioned from employment with MDR to launch The HellerResults Group, a global strategic consultancy serving business and non-profits. His relationship with MDR,EdNET, and this monthly article—renamed the HellerResults column—will continue. If you need strategic insight, partners, international connections, stronger boards, keynoters, or entrepreneurial savvy and want the insight of 30 years at the business and technology crossroads of the education market, you can reach him at 858-720-1914 and nelson@hellerresults.com.
