As we all know all too well, the hardest part of rolling out a new tool is change management. Yes, you’ve done a lot of really good thinking and really hard work to get the tool ready. But unfortunately, that doesn’t mean people will use it the way you want them to.
Good change management is essential to getting value from your tech stack, especially for tools like Pigment where implementation usually means big process changes. And in working with our customers, we’ve identified 5 important elements of good change management that help businesses get the highest possible return on their Pigment investment.
1. Identify and involve internal champions as early as possible
Depending on the culture, industry and makeup of your organization, adoption of new tools may come easier or harder to the overall workforce. However, there are almost always champions within the team who understand the vision you have and are willing to input, advocate and lead by example.
The best way to identify these champions is simply to listen. Everyone has pain points – that’s why you’re solving for them with a new tool – but champions will also have ideas. They’ll be interested in the solution.
Once you’ve identified your champions and listened to all the relevant pain points, there are a few ways you can leverage this enthusiasm to help enact change within the business:
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Use your champions to create user profiles. These will help identify the goals and needs of your end users so that any new functionality, dashboards or use cases you build out will actually solve for the pain points of the intended audience.
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Allow early access and experimentation for your champions. They’ll be the best people to tell you honestly if something is fit for purpose, and to generate ideas for how to make it better. You’ll want to include some more skeptical users in your testing, as they’ll be better at breaking things, but your champions should also be included.
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Provide early training for your champions. They can then serve as guides to other users with similar goals, helping you create a network of advocates within the organization to encourage and enforce new processes.
2. Communicate early and often, about relevant things
The most successful implementations we see are ones where the project team communicates early and often with the people who will be impacted by the change. Some important communication moments include:
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When the scope of the implementation has been agreed
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Regular implementation updates (at least monthly), including important milestones reached and functionality built
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When the first testing begins, and what the results are when it is completed
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When the launch plan and timeline are agreed
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Information about training dates and formats (see #3)
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Information about launch celebrations (see #4)
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Regular reminders of new process changes, especially around important dates like the start of annual budget planning, monthly closing, etc.
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Post-launch surveys (see #5)
The important thing for all of these communications is to make sure you’re sharing details they’ll actually care about. While they’re unlikely to care about a big modeling milestone for example (though we’ll happily celebrate with you!), they will care about completing new processes or building out new ways for them to get the insights they need.
3. Provide relevant enablement in a format that works for your organization
Our most successful customers don’t just train their users, they actively enable them. This means they make the processes as easy as possible to begin with, so that the training is less overwhelming and remembering what they need to do is easy.
Training is important, of course, and while the Pigment Academy is great for becoming acquainted with the platform and its terminology and structure, your specific workspace and processes will need to be explained, too. After a larger launch/introduction meeting, we recommend spending time with users in small groups (or even individually) to make sure they understand how to do exactly what you need them to do.
This can all be helpfully supplemented with Loom videos, internal process documentation and further training, but nothing beats making the process easy to follow to begin with. This article is specifically about budget owners, but the principles apply to anyone using Pigment primarily through boards.
4. Create a big fuss about the launch
Launch celebrations serve several important purposes, including:
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To make a big deal of the time and effort your team has put into building your models
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So that everyone is clear on when Pigment is live and ready to be used
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To make the change top of mind so everyone remembers there’s something new
The bigger the launch celebration, the more it will feel like an important milestone in your company’s journey, and the more likely people are to remember why you’re having it. It’s certainly not a replacement for engagement and enablement, but it’s worth doing to solidify the benefits above.
5. Survey your colleagues regularly to make sure they’re happy
Let’s be honest – you’re going to be pretty aware of whether people are using Pigment or not, and probably whether they’re happy or not. As a team that works to support others within the organization, it’s not in your nature (or the best interest of your new processes) to launch a new tool and then step back from the people using it.
However, sometimes it’s difficult to take a step back from the individual conversations you’re having and get a big picture view of how well Pigment is serving your organization.
Maybe you’ve got one or two people who are struggling regularly, but the rest of the team is actually quite happy with what’s there. Or maybe you aren’t hearing much and assuming that means everything’s okay, but actually people are passing around secret Excel sheets because they can’t get what they need.
As the business continues to grow and evolve, and as the team changes as well, it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of how people are using Pigment, and we recommend using surveys to do this. It ensures that you get a wider sample size of feedback and can extract action items better.
Here are some questions we recommend asking your user base at least twice per year:
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How often do you access Pigment?
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Do you understand what you’re expected to do in Pigment?
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How clear is it where to go and what to do in Pigment?
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Is there anything you can see that you wouldn’t expect to see, or anything you can’t see that you would expect to see?
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How effectively are you able to complete the relevant processes in Pigment?
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How helpful are the insights you’re getting from Pigment?
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Do you have any requests for things you would like to see or do in Pigment, or changes we should make?
Apart from the last question, we recommend each of the questions being quantitative or multiple choice. You could then add an optional qualitative field below the quantitative one to collect more specific insights.
How to do this even if you’ve already launched Pigment
So you’ve already launched Pigment – now what? How can you harness the impact of these best practices moving forward?
Beyond the obvious answer of using these steps when implementing further use cases, here’s what we recommend you do now:
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Find your champions now. Who really understands the vision you have for Pigment and the value it could bring? Use their insights to design new ways to enable your colleagues.
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Start sending surveys straight away. Validate what your champions are telling you, and use the feedback you get to help you prioritize improvements.
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Create training and enablement materials for any processes that need to be completed in Pigment. You can link to these in your Application Guide boards, or even directly within the boards your users are accessing.
From there, you should be able to follow the launch and survey best practices above for a successful rollout!
We want to hear from you!
Have you done anything in particular to enable your organization and improve adoption and value? Let us know in the comments so others can learn from your experience!