Change Enablement

Integrating Project and Change Management

Our Client

Our client is an award-winning, $500M workers’ compensation insurance carrier that supports tens of thousands of companies in their state.

Transformation Challenge

Founded more than a century ago, our client desired to maintain its market leadership and position as a trusted and recognized insurance provider. But with smaller and more nimble competitors adopting innovative technology to optimize operations, its market advantage was in jeopardy.

To secure its market position, the company launched multiple strategic, cross-functional business initiatives ranging from reimagined services and customer experience to the implementation of enterprise-wide systems and new technologies. As an unintended consequence of these simultaneous projects, employees across the enterprise—not only in IT—were facing changes from all sides, and many reported feeling overwhelmed. An air of frustration among employees was beginning to hurt morale.

Our client engaged us to develop a strategic approach to project management and change management that would bolster employees for the journey ahead.

Our Approach

While helping plan and manage our client’s various initiatives, we also focused on establishing greater visibility of project impacts across the organization. Our team developed an innovative, custom-built tool in Salesforce that mapped out stakeholder groups in the organization and provided an “impact score” across time. The tool formed a heatmap that provided a quick visual representation of the magnitude of impact for each group. At a glance, leaders could see which groups were being tapped at any given time and, therefore, where change saturation could pose a greater risk to project delivery, employee satisfaction, and productivity.

Equipped with this new tool, the consulting team set to work on a change enablement strategy. The team developed a solution around reward and recognition mechanisms, gamifying the experience for employees to encourage greater engagement with the Salesforce environment. The solution involved designing “Goal Badges” that represented key employee and team achievements while working in the newly introduced solution. The badges represented the stages of ascending a mountain to the summit, and they were awarded and publicly visible to the rest of the organization upon completion.

Results

As project leaders utilized the change saturation heatmap, their visibility into projects across the organization improved. This greater visibility enabled them to synchronize and coordinate project timelines, resources, and even training, without leaning too heavily on any one stakeholder group. This also led to a crucial change in the organization around how projects were approved, and how utilization was planned, allowing them to take on the right projects at the right time.

With the implementation of the achievement badges, the rate of technology adoption increased, and employees reported higher satisfaction due to an improvement in project commitments and more carefully timed changes. To date, the change function and team has continued to mature.