Getting the “people side” right is among the hardest parts of a large-scale organizational transformation. Phase 1a of One Washington will introduce a lot of change to how agency staff perform work today – especially as the state prepares to replace AFRS with its new cloud-based ERP system (Workday). Recognizing the state of Washington is a highly federated environment, the One Washington team prioritized organizational change management (OCM) as a way of helping impacted staff within agencies build awareness, understanding, and knowledge for the changes ahead. To that end, the team created an OCM plan template that agencies are using to create their own plans aligned to the broader One Washington organizational change strategy. The templates were shared with agency support team (AST) Leads and then presented in a series of town hall style sessions in which the OCM team walked through the structure of the template and answered questions from participants. During the sessions, several agencies shared their completed plans, talked about lessons learned, and lead practices about how they have engaged staff to help other agencies.
We spoke with Judy Hall, who spearheaded the OCM plan for the Department of Health to ask her about their approach to organizational change. It was important to the DOH team to keep in mind that many specific change impacts that are coming are currently unknown and will be developed throughout the phases of the program. Constructing an agile, iterative change management plan has been crucial to the success of building awareness and curating support from within the agency.
Can you share why you think an agile approach to this kind of change management plan works best for you and your organization?
DOH has worked on the COVID response for almost two years now. We have gotten used to a rapid pace of change, with key processes and systems being developed through prototypes and multiple iterations. It has been some time since we’ve had the luxury of a fully developed project plan where we know the changes and the impacts at the beginning of a project. The current hybrid agile methodology that One Washington is using for change management fits within that paradigm and provides just-in-time information - general information available early on, with more detail as it becomes available. This appears to be working well for our impact staff. It allows us to quickly identify issues and escalate or mitigate them quickly.
You’ve mentioned that building the ‘why’ behind this change cycle has been really important: can you share one or two of your strategies used to get buy-in from your agency staff?
Using the communications created by the One Washington team has been very important in sharing the “why” behind this change. Many people have been looking forward to an improved financial management system.
Our project lead is also a very strong champion for this change and translates the large agency “why” into improvements that staff will see in their daily work. Being able to see how it will impact their daily work (even at a high level), has created great buy-in for the project.
Impacted staff are engaged in One Washington workgroups, reviews, and town halls. The team meets regularly to provide input, identify potential issues and solutions for DOH-specific solutions and provide feedback to the One Washington team through the project lead and project manager. This allows impacted staff to stay engaged and participate in problem solving related to the change.
What have been some of the more useful materials or meetings that you’ve experienced from One Washington to help you implement this change management plan?
The one pagers developed by One Washington OCM team (Benefits of One Washington, Why Workday, Hybrid Agile Methodology), FAQs, OCM presentations, and the OCM plan template have been very helpful tools for our agency – creating a foundational understanding of the importance of OCM, explaining the “why” behind the project, and providing consistent answers and messaging about the project. It has kept us aligned with the larger project and prevented miscommunication or lack of communication with our impacted staff.
Your change management plan was introduced in August: can you share where your organization is at in the plan, and what are your next steps?
We are reviewing and updating our plan monthly. Currently we are looking at the Pulse Survey results and the Change Impact Assessment to develop DOH-specific communications for agency leadership, all staff, and impacted staff. We think most of our communications will be targeting impacted staff this month. The project lead and executive sponsor (with support from the change manager) are also developing a format for reporting progress to agency leadership.
Back to Top
|
