Advice to IT: how to make your consumerization project stick

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This is a guest post by Doug Neal and Jim Ginsburgh, researchers for CSC’s Leading Edge Forum. They will be leading a Readiness Assessment Workshop at the CITE Conference & Expo on Sunday, June 2, in San Francisco.

The move to consumerization may be the biggest change project of your career – because it touches everyone in the firm.  With stakes like that, it is important for your career to get it right for the long term.

However, consumerization projects can suffer from a number of problems, from failure to launch to failure to stick. We think that the root cause is a failure to treat them as a change management effort. The standard project management steps – requirements analysis (where the client has to sign-off on the requirements so that there can be no complaints later), prototype development (again, we require a sign-off to protect us) and production rollout – don’t address change. They don’t build awareness of the need, nor desire for the solution, and, in particular, they do not foster the culture or budget change that will make the initiative stick even if management changes.

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As part of your project plan, do more than lay out the tasks and timelines. In parallel with your development steps, build a series of explicit change management steps so that you do indeed build awareness, create desire, educate and build capabilities – and do what it takes to make it stick.

There are a number of change management models that you might consult. They include the five-step ADKAR  (see diagram) and the eight-step model from John Kotter of the Harvard Business School  (Kotter adds formation of a guiding coalition as one of the steps).

 

 

All change management programs advocate involving the leadership. From our experience, we would say that executive leadership is helpful, but the executive must publicly "walk the talk." Moreover, it is middle managers who wonder how their staff are spending their time who are also necessary for a successful rollout. There needs to be something of explicit value to the middle managers, or you will see resistance.

If you were starting a new company, you would embrace consumerization across the board on Day 1, but most firms do not have that luxury.  The question, therefore, is how to get from where you are, to where you want to be. Explicit change management is key and figuring out answers to the following questions will help:

Change and project management questions:

•        Is IT incentivized to tolerate the hassle and make big change(s)?

•        Do your plans include the broader aspects of change, not just the technology?