As the state has been working to streamline business processes, replacing the budgeting system used in every department and consolidating job titles, it has also been working to streamline those changes. A key to that is paying attention to the concept of change management.
“In major transformations of large enterprises, they and their advisers conventionally focus their attention on devising the best strategic and tactical plans. But to succeed, they also must have an intimate understanding of the human side of change management — the alignment of the company’s culture, values, people, and behaviors — to encourage the desired results,” said an article about change management that appeared in strategy+business magazine.
The California Department of Technology (CDT) has begun holding change management training.
“The CDT Change Management Process ensures all changes to the CDT environment are captured and managed according to a standard set of best practices in order to reduce the risk to the IT services we deliver to our customers,” the CDT’s site describes.
The Department of FI$Cal (Financial Information System for California) has been working to replace software and change habits around budgeting so that the state will do all its budgeting on the same, uniform system.
“We are using the system for accounting. We have the entire state using the system for procurement,” Chief Deputy Director Neeraj Chauhan told Techwire.
And the system is replacing some habits that have been built over 30 years, with institutional knowledge that has been spread over multiple employees. In order to simplify this and make everyone comfortable, the department has a Change Management Office, headed by Will Padilla.
“Change management is an organizational practice that recognizes that change is a process and that individuals and organizations can approach change at different paces,” Padilla told Techwire.
“FI$Cal approaches departmental onboarding with change management techniques to address the natural human reaction to resist change,” FI$Cal states in its fact sheet. “The biggest challenge to FI$Cal’s success is the human element. The technology is working. Our goal is to prepare our end users so they can be successful with the new technology.”
The entire turnover takes 12 months and includes hundreds of steps. Padilla said executive sponsorship is also key to making the changeover successful.
“There’s a huge component, which is technical,” Chauhan said. “Another big component of the change management program is training of the users. The third piece, this is the squishy piece, and it is very hard to apply logic to it or figure out a science, and it is all about getting the departments comfortable.”
Chauhan said that much of the resistance FI$Cal encounters is based in fear of change.
“That’s why I equate it to the grieving process. You can’t engineer around human emotion,” Chauhan said. “There's a lot of people grieving because they spent 20, 30 years perfecting a process.”
Padilla is in charge of bringing struggling departments in for training or going to the site and assisting.
“Change workshops for managers and supervisors give leaders from onboarding departments the tools to communicate the FI$Cal change with their employees,” the fact sheet continues.
While FI$Cal is focusing its efforts on people, that doesn’t just include software support. It also includes programmatic support like running the legacy budgeting system behind the Office of the Controller at the same time it’s using the FI$Cal system for a full year. That will allow the office to maintain its previous records and minimize mistakes during the changeover.
The Department of Human Resources (CalHR) has begun using change management, as well. Involving people in the process of IT job consolidations, through open forums and educational panels, has simplified the conversion from more than 30 titles to nine. CalHR has created a program to explain exactly how the classifications were cleared and what that could mean for people’s careers.
The CalHR informational presentations include answers to questions about salary and career paths. It also encourages communication between managers and employees.
“Change management isn’t unique to large IT projects,” Chauhan said. “It’s really heightened in large IT projects because if you don’t prepare, you might have a great product but no one wants to use it. It’s not a nice-to-have on a large IT project. It’s a have-to-have.”
