CASE STUDY | CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Quay worked with a highly regarded consultancy firm known for shaping Australia’s cities and communities, consulting on a wide range of issues that impact and benefit urban development. The successful delivery of its new business practice solution highlights the value of strategic change management in delivering sustainable benefits to its business.
Key deliverables
- Strategic change management to drive benefits into the business
- High level of sponsor engagement and stakeholder management to enable the business to bring its team on the journey
- Clear governance and assurance measures designed to support the business to deliver best practice and fit-for-purpose change strategy
- Resource management to ensure the right people were doing the right work at the right time.
Background
As a leading urban planning firm, the Client had experienced significant growth within Australia and more recently into Asia. However, as the business grew, its existing software solutions were approaching end-of-life and were no longer fit-for-purpose for its now-multinational teams.
The Client saw the opportunity to implement a practice management system that would enable it to standardise business practices and processes across the business. With an experienced, dynamic, and engaged workforce, staff were aware of the potential benefit of a practice-wide solution and the opportunities it would deliver to better manage clients, opportunities, projects, billing and financial accounting requirements.
The Challenge
The Client established an internal project team for the project, drawing on subject matter expertise from within the business, which was tasked with identifying, procuring and implementing a new a project-driven solution designed specifically for professional services firms.
While the technology would work largely out of the box with some refinements to better suit specific needs of the Client’s business, the refinements meant that some operating processes and procedures would need to change.
As the project delivery window passed the two-year mark, the Client’s leadership team sought an independent review of the project, which revealed that while the project team understood the technical requirements of the solution, there was a need to increase the focus on change, adoption and implementation
Faced with a hard deadline to deliver the project within six months, the Client sought a referral for an experienced change and implementation specialist and engaged Quay Consulting to support the project’s sponsor.
The brief was to establish and deliver change into the business via a fit-for-purpose change strategy, without impacting the project timeline or budget.
The Approach
Quay engaged with both the sponsor and stakeholders across the business to review the solution, the change planning, and the rollout of the project. Our evaluation of the project echoed the earlier report that indicated that the change management planning focused on training, rather than strategic change management that the project called for.
Having a highly engaged sponsor who understood that change strategy was required to manage potential impacts and benefits was a significant asset to the project, particularly in managing stakeholder expectations around impacts and benefits delivery.
This enabled Quay to establish and embed change capability within the senior leadership to take the business through a period of significant change by focusing on:
- Governance and structure: Defining four workstreams (technology, solution delivery, business processes, and change and adoption) with four workstream leads to ensure that project tasks and deliverables were clear and that dependencies were highlighted.
- Change and Adoption: Shift the focus from ‘project’ to ‘business’ and moving ownership of from the project team to the business owners
- Resources: Clarified roles and responsibilities within the project team and wider business to ensure they were fit-for-purpose to deliver the solution successfully.
Quay’s approach included change initiatives that would support the project sponsor’s ability to engage with stakeholders and ensure they understood the change impacts and benefits for the business. The change management impacts were carefully managed through:
- Ensuring alignment to best practice change principles
- Developing a fit-for-purpose process that was customised for the client
- Simple and easy to understand messaging across the business
- A repeatable, flexible, and scalable approach to suit the needs of different business units
Outcomes
As the delivery deadline approached, Quay worked with the Client’s’ internal teams to develop a branded communication strategy that would showcase the new system to the staff, branding the solution so that it aligned with the Client’s ethos of investing in systems that enable them to work smarter, not harder.
Quay’s change consultant joined the project sponsor on a roadshow, visiting each office to engage stakeholder groups across the business, demonstrating how the new system would be implemented. The approach was well received by staff who could see how it would benefit their work and prepared them for training
Our change management approach, coupled with strong sponsor engagement, has enabled the Client to deliver its project to the deadline and within budget, resulting in a largely seamless implementation. The approach also delivered capability uplift within the business’s capacity to deliver sustained change.
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