Secrets to Organizational Change Management Communication Strategy

	Package Selection and Implementation

by Vyom Bhuta

August 4, 2003

Activities aimed at building commitment toward the system are critical in helping an organization successfully manage the change and transition to a new system. This becomes even more important during enterprise system implementation projects.

The strategy should focus on a communication protocol that provides necessary information to each impacted audience or stakeholder group to ensure maximum user acceptance, with minimum resistance and negative impact on performance.

Communications are designed to build stakeholders commitment to the project and to the new processes. The objectives of the Change Management Strategy should be to:

• Build acceptance and ownership of the system across the organization and business units.
• Build commitment to the system
• Sell the benefits of the system
• Manage user expectations and information needs
• Provide information on available support and resources
• Provide information about the system to impacted audiences and obtain their input
• Reduce uncertainty and fear of new technology and processes
• Develop a framework to coordinate all communication efforts
• Ensure that consistent messages are delivered to stakeholders at all levels and that decisions, events and activities are communicated in a timely manner
• Make communications an integral part of the project team's daily activities
• Prepare employees to communicate project information to line leaders

To address the above objectives, the strategy should focus on answering the following questions:

• Who needs to know about the changes?
• What do they need to know about the changes?
• When do they need to know about the changes?
• How should information be communicated?
• From whom should the information be communicated?

Keep the following principles in mind, which will help you execute the communication strategies throughout the project:

• Involve all team members and team leads during the development and review of all external communications.
• Develop focused, targeted communications at the right time to the correct audience.
• Send consistent messages using internationally understood terms.
• Utilize appropriate and effective communication vehicles for each unique audience group.
• Communicate concise, relevant, interesting content with a positive tone.
• Provide and encourage the use of feedback channels for all business unit managers.
• Provide timely responses to all questions and feedback received.
• Provide a repository of project wide communications and questions and answers that is easily accessible to all team leaders.

The next step in the Change Management Communication strategy is to determine the available channel of communication and measuring effectiveness of the strategy.