Technology Implementation goes Hand-in-Hand with Therapy, Steps 4 and 5

In the first blog entry of this series, I used this AdultSwim video on YouTube to outline the five stages of grief and then related them to the five steps to a successful technology implementation. The subsequent entries included have gone into more detail for each stage and step – Needs/Denial, Process/Anger, and Training/Bargaining. That brings us to this final entry in this series, which will cover: Step 4: Technology Rollout; or, Stage 4: Depression Stage 5: Rallying the Users; or Stage 5: Acceptance Along the way I’ve drawn a comparison between Technology Implementation, Therapy and the Kübler-Ross Model for Grief. Implementing new technology in your agency, or any organization, can be hard and if not done right can have catastrophic consequences. Don’t believe me? Just ask Hershey; yes, the chocolate company. Hershey Food Corp spent $112 million and 30 months of implementation effort, however, when they attempted to go live in July 1999, the company experienced catastrophic failures with sales order processing, which had a crippling effect in shipping delays and deliveries of incomplete orders. That’s a lot of melting chocolate. Assuming your technology implementation is launched successfully and is rolled out to the users, there’s likely to be some collateral damage in the form of end user depression. Let’s face it, people fear change. Whether in the public sector of private sector, change can be tough and lots of people have a hard time with it. When processes that used to take you three hours to complete are now taking you six hours to complete thanks to a new learning curve, any reasonable person would get depressed. After that initial learning process is winding down and you start seeing the light at the end of the training-tunnel, and you realize this is actually making your life easier, that’s when you’ll be more likely to move to the last step, of acceptance. As the VP of Marketing, I’m a believer in message clarity trumping persuasion. If you can show your audience the actual clear-cut benefits of a particular product, everything else should take care of itself. The same can be applied to technology (eg. that once they get past the initial pain, they’ll cut their process time in half). If you can prove – both before and after launch – to your users how the new technology will make their lives easier and less complicated, it will help justify the learning curve and will help users accept the change. These benefits should have been spelled out in the ‘Assessing Needs’ step of planning, so it will be simple repetition.   And as I always say, the key to human comprehension is repetition. Keep in mind, having to repeat training and reiterating benefits over and over again may drive you into a depression.  But, don’t lose heart.  Stick with and acceptance will come for both you and your users.  In my experiences launching new IT systems, it can take a full year before your organization reaches the acceptance stage.  But, it is well worth it. So there you have it. Technology Implementation can be a long hard process. It’s going to take a lot of planning and a good understanding of what you really hope to accomplish. Hopefully you learned some best practices to keep you out of the therapist’s chair or worse, the IT quicksand. When in doubt though, the Kübler-Ross Model can be a big help.