Webinar: Can You Rescue a Technology Project with Change Management?

Presenter

Transcript beneath Reddit AMA

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Reddit AMA – Debbie Cameron

Getting back on track with successful change management program.

If your project is struggling, it’s never too late to leverage change management! Start by talking to your stakeholders: What’s working? What’s not? What do they need? Quick surveys or listening sessions can help you get a sense of where people stand. Then, put together a simple plan with clear steps and owners, and set up support like office hours or job aids. Even small steps can rebuild trust and get your project moving in the right direction.

We have a large project coming up, so keen to hear some lessons learned we can incorporate to keep the project on track

Honestly, the biggest lesson is to bring people into the process early and keep them involved. Don’t make decisions in a vacuum. Your stakeholders will have valuable insights, and they need to have a voice in what impacts them. If they’re left out, you risk missing what really matters to them.

Before you launch, take the temperature of your team. A quick readiness survey or a few listening sessions can help you spot resistance or confusion before it becomes a problem.

Also, don’t just focus on getting to go-live. Make sure you have a plan for how people will actually use the new system and keep checking in with them after launch. Feedback loops are your friend where you gain valuable insights you can use them to adjust as you go.

And finally, leadership support is huge. When leaders are aligned and visible, it sets the tone for the whole project. Remember, go-live isn’t the finish line. It is just the start of making real change stick.

What are ways to introduce new culture into an organization that is not well acquainted with change management practices?

The best advice I can give is to start small and keep improving as you go. Make change management a real priority, not just something extra on the side. It needs to be a dedicated workstream that is resourced. Get people involved with tools like stakeholder mapping, impact analysis, listening sessions, and readiness surveys. Celebrate the small wins, keep communication open, and make sure everyone knows where to get help. Over time, these habits will help your organization become more open and adaptable

Help! Scope creep took my tech project off track.

At Build we start every project with a project charter, which is a strong foundation. Internally, it’s consistently described as a tool for:

• Surfacing concerns about the scope of work early
• Clearly outline what is in scope and what is NOT in scope.
• Aligning stakeholders on goals, roles, and deliverables
• Serving as a reference point for decision-making and accountability

But it should be noted, timing matters. Project Charters are most effective when shared before kickoff, not after. Throughout the project Change Leaders should bring stakeholders back to the Project Charter as a touchstone of what is included in the project and what goals and objectives we are trying to meet with the project.

Projects should also have a formal change control process where all change requests must be documents and approved, which involves analyzing impact on scope, budget and timeline.

Risk Registers are also an effective tool to help manage scope creep.

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Transcript

Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT webinar, Can You Rescue a Technology Project with Change Management? My name is Carolyn Woodard. I’m the Outreach Director for Community IT, and I’ll be your host and moderator today.

I’m very happy to hear from our guest, Debbie Cameron from Build Consulting, who is an expert in change management in nonprofit tech projects. But first, I’m going to go over our learning objectives.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this hour, we hope that we will understand change management techniques. If you’re not familiar with them or if you are familiar with them, maybe a few more that you haven’t thought of or heard about. Learn why tech tools and projects fail. Not just at nonprofits, but at nonprofits. Discuss what you can still do later in a technology project to rescue it. Learn tools and tactics to reengage your team. And review real world success stories that Debbie is going to share with us.

Introductions

And with that, I would love to turn it over. Debbie, can you introduce yourself?

Debbie Cameron: I would love to, thank you. Hi everyone, I’m Debbie Cameron, a partner with Build Consulting.

I’ve been doing management and IT consulting for more than 25 years, about 20 or 19, 20 of those, exclusively with nonprofits. I started my career working with Arthur Anderson and Bearing Point. And at Bearing Point, found my way to a nonprofit vertical, where I fell in love with working with mission-driven organizations.

It’s during this time I discovered change management because like every perfectionist out there, I wanted to figure out how to make my projects more successful. And, you know, there’s so many reasons why technology projects are not successful, but change management tends to be a fairly large reason why. And, you know, it just drew me in and became a professional passion. And I’m excited to share some of that with you today.

A little bit about Build Consulting. Our approach to all of our projects is really grounded in our unique change management framework. It’s designed to make changes easier. We like to think it helps them from becoming chaotic. Our leaders have over 20 years of experience in driving technology innovation and transformation, especially for large nonprofits, associations, and foundations.

We focus solely on these organizations, so we really understand their needs and can offer them the right solutions. We are passionately independent. We do not take any incentives or align with any vendors or partners. So, our advice is always focused on our clients and non-biased. We like to think of ourselves as advocates for our clients, really because we want them to trust that the recommendations we put forward really align with their mission and goals and really are in their best interests.

Carolyn Woodard: And thank you so much, Debbie, for joining us today. I’m really excited to talk about this topic. My name is Carolyn Woodard, and I am the Director of Marketing for Community IT. But before I was at Community IT, I worked for many years in nonprofits for a large international nonprofit and a smaller local one where I was the IT Director.

And I am so excited about this topic today because at one of my nonprofits that I worked at, we had, I inherited managing Razor’s Edge. And we used to say that, and I was several people removed from the people who had made the decision, but we used to say it was like we had the Lamborghini, and we only drove it five miles an hour. Because we just had never, as an organization, had not embraced that tool.

I wish I had known some change management techniques. I could have gone back. I heard a lot. I did a lot of listening, so I heard a lot about what was wrong with the implementation. But I feel like this topic would have really helped me then.

A little bit more before we begin about Community IT. If you’re not familiar with us, if you have come to a webinar before, you’re one of our clients, welcome. But if you’re not familiar with us, a little bit more about us. We are 100% employee-owned managed services provider. We provide outsourced IT support, and we work exclusively with nonprofit organizations.

Our mission is to help nonprofits accomplish their missions through the effective use of technology. We are big fans of what well-managed IT can do for your nonprofit, and we serve nonprofits across the United States. We’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, which our anniversary is next year.

We’re technology experts. We are consistently given the MSP 501 recognition for being a top MSP, which is an honor we received again in 2025. I host a weekly podcast in this monthly free webinar series. You can access all of our previous webinar videos and transcripts on our website, communityit.com, and register for upcoming webinars there. There’s just a ton of free resources. We really want to help our sector be able to build your IT capacity and use IT to support your missions.

For these presentations, Community IT, like Build Consulting, is vendor agnostic. We only make recommendations to clients. We only do that based on their specific business needs. We never try to get a client into a product because we get an incentive or benefit from that. But we do consider ourselves a best of breed IT provider, so it’s really our job to know the landscape, the tools that are available, reputable, and widely used. And we make our recommendations on that basis for our clients based on their business needs, priorities, and budget.

And a little bit more about us, our mission is to create value for the nonprofit sector through well-managed IT. And we also identify four key values as employee owners that define our company, trust, knowledge, service, and balance. So, we seek always to treat people with respect and fairness, to empower our staff, clients, and the sector to understand and use technology effectively, to be helpful with our talents, and we recognize that the health of our communities is vital to our well-being, and that work is only a part of our lives.

Poll: What is your comfort level with Change Management?

Okay, so now we’re going to go ahead and start with a poll like we like to do. So, this is to help you all in the webinar tell us your comfort level with change management.

So the choices are you’re unfamiliar with change management, you have worked with someone who used change management tools and techniques, you have used change management techniques yourself, you are a change management super user yourself, so we’d love to hear from you in chat, and also you could say that’s not applicable or other. I like to leave that option for people who might be in the webinar for other reasons.

Debbie Cameron: So, it looks like we’re split pretty equally between those that are unfamiliar with change management and those that have used some change management techniques. And then we have about half of those that are in the middle. They’ve worked with someone who’s used change management techniques.

So, it looks like we have folks of all different levels, and those that have had experience with change management techniques themselves. I’d love if anything that I talk about today, if you’ve used a different version or have any thoughts to share, please put that in chat because I think we can all learn from each other today. And the more interactive, I think the more productive and fun this will be.

Agenda: Can You Rescue a Technology Project with Change Management?

Okay, well, let’s dive in. So, our agenda for today – Carolyn really went over the learning objectives, but it’s pretty simple.

First, we’ll dive into some common reasons why projects go off track and tools become underused. I think understanding these pitfalls is the first step to turning things around.

Next, we’ll talk about what we can do now. Even if your project is already in trouble, there are actionable steps you can take right now to make a difference. And we want to talk about those today.

Here, we’ll also share some practical tips and strategies, some tools that you can leverage, some tactics that you can put into play to re-engage your team and get folks back on board. It’s never too late to build momentum, in my opinion.

And then I’ll share a real-world success story of a project turnaround, and then we’ll open it up for some Q&A.

Why is change management necessary?

At Build Consulting, we have two core beliefs that motivate us both to do this work and to approach it in the way that we do. The first is our belief that technology can empower organizations to both work more effectively and to change the world.

The second is that technology fails so often because we treat it like a baseball field in Iowa. We think if we build it, people will come. We get the shiny new technology, but we don’t recognize the need for the organization to change and get shinier, too. This is a formula that I reference a lot. In fact, if you’ve ever attended a webinar I’ve given or if you’ve worked with me in the past, you’ve likely seen it. And that’s because I think it really drives home the point and it seemingly never gets old for folks because everyone has lived a version of this.

This equation highlights that simply adding new technology to an organization without making necessary changes can lead to high costs without achieving the desired improvements. It’s crucial to align the technology strategy with your organizational strategy and find the right things to add to the formula that will make the outcome a transformed organization because that’s critical to your success and it’s really why we’re putting the time and resources into the project to begin with. That’s the outcome we’re trying to achieve.

More than 50% of nonprofit technology projects fail because the tech moves forward, but the organization does not. And maybe some of you have lived through this or are currently living through it, which is why you’re here today, which brings me to the next point where I want to clearly outline the change management challenge.

I mentioned earlier that change management is a big component of why we see technology projects fail. And here’s the connection. Here’s the driver of why that’s the case. A good deal of the failure rate of technology projects is related to the fact that we simply do not do a good job of anticipating the effect of these projects on the people they’re supposed to help. When these impacts hit, we lose those folks. They may disengage, we lose their trust, and ultimately, their willingness to adopt or champion the change that we’re trying to implement, turning what could have been a transformative initiative into a missed opportunity.

And as a result, we don’t get the return on investment we hope for. And in a lot of cases for the clients we work with, the organization has already introduced a large change without an appropriate level of change management, so we’ve already lost folks and we’re trying to figure out how to regain their trust and engagement on a new project.

What is change management?

At Build, we like the definition by ProSci, which is a leading research and consulting company in the field of change management. And that definition is change management is to prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change.

You will notice it does not say guides how we make people happy on a project. It’s a frequent mistake about change management. It’s change management isn’t about making everyone happy. It’s about making everybody ready for the change. It’s about making everybody feel supported. It’s about making everybody feel like they have a voice. When we start working with a lot of our clients, we find the culture supports the following statement. If you have emailed it, you have changed it. And if that’s not it, what should change management look like in an organization?

We at Build believe it’s a concurrent work stream to any project, and it can be done by an internal resource or by a consultant. But what we feel strongly, it cannot be as the side job of somebody who’s managing the technical change.

Oftentimes, there’s a technical project manager focused on executing every aspect of the project, budget, timeline, resources, action items, risks, issues. It’s a lot to ask one person to do all of that, and oh, by the way, also focus on change management. So, all that said, we still get a lot of questions for folks.

Do I need change management?

And that the big test is, if you’re asking folks to adjust their behavior, then you need change management. And perhaps today, what if I’m into a project or I’m live?

We’re here today to figure out what went wrong, and we didn’t leverage change management. Well, what do we do?

Let’s be honest. Many of us don’t start with change management. Not because we don’t care, not because we didn’t want to, but we were overwhelmed, we were under resourced or simply didn’t know where to begin. And that’s okay, you’re not alone.

We’ve worked with countless organizations who launched major initiatives without a change management plan. It shouldn’t be considered a failure; it’s just a reality. But the good news is, it’s never too late to introduce change management. Even if your project is mid-flight or already live, you can still turn things around.

Why this matters now is because if your project is struggling, it’s often not because the technology is broken, it’s because the people impacted weren’t supported through the change. So, let’s talk about what happens when change management is skipped. And again, this isn’t to assign blame, it’s reality.

What we’re trying to do is understand the patterns, because we know why projects go off track. We want to know how to fix them.

What went wrong with your last technology project?

Here’s a great thought question. We’d like folks to contribute an answer in the chat. In a nutshell, what went wrong with your last technology project, or maybe what’s currently going wrong with your technology project?

Carolyn Woodard: And someone has said communication. I know when we asked this at registration, a couple different people said scope creep. A couple people had put in that the stakeholders weren’t involved in the original putting the project together.

Someone in the chat says culture. Someone has put in, not everyone from the team uses the platform. So, it sounds like the platform was the project, and not everyone is using it.

People having a hard time accepting change.

I think we don’t talk about that enough, but there’s real fear and anxiety around, like, I know how I did my job, now how is my job going to change when the tool that I use changes?

Adoption, culture, and process as well. Fear of the unknown, yep, that’s a good one. Didn’t give users enough training, someone else is putting in. Yeah, the tech is changing so fast. I’m no longer a super user.

Debbie Cameron: Yeah. People like to be really good. I mean, who doesn’t like to be good at their job? Everyone wants to be good at their job. Everyone wants to be the person that people come to for information. The risk, the fear of giving that up is a real thing. All of those things land for me. And unfortunately, it means most of you are going to be quite bored during this next slide, which is why projects go off track, because you already know this and you’re living it.

Even with the best intentions, as we all know, projects can veer off course. And often, as we know, it’s not the technology, it’s the people side that gets missed.

Top 5 reasons nonprofit technology projects don’t do well

So I went through my projects that I’ve worked on in my 25 years and asked some fellow builders to do the same so that we could really elevate. What are the top five common reasons we see projects struggle or folks come to us because the project is not doing well and they’re asking us for help? And these were the top five that come up again and again.

Stakeholder engagement. I’ve seen projects where IT was in the best intended way, made decisions about a software, feeling like they were serving their stakeholders and building capacity for them and giving them the answer to what they needed. But then when the stakeholders were brought in, they wanted a say, and they wanted to be part of the decision. And in their mind, the system that was selected didn’t meet their needs and then trust and frustration already popped up. And you have to go back and start over. And this time with stakeholder input.

Change readiness. We had a client who launched a CRM without checking how ready the teams were. And if the teams even knew how the CRM was going to be involved in their work. And when we went, when they went live, resistance popped up everywhere. They brought us in to do post-launch interventions that could have been avoided. If they had done a simple readiness survey, that would have helped inform project activities to address the concerns and challenges and maybe created the vision for those folks.

Adoption planning, helping folks understand what does the future look like and how are we going to measure if we’re being successful and don’t let six months go by post-school live until we realize there’s a problem. We had an organization spend two years implementing a system, but again, they didn’t plan for how folks were going to use it and they didn’t really plan for how they were going to help onboard folks to the system and ensure they were using it. And after going live, the system sat unused. No one knew what was expected of them. Leadership wasn’t modeling behavior.

And feedback loops. Those are crucial. Stakeholders want a voice. Everybody wants a voice. We, I mean, think I want a voice in any decision that’s being made about my work life. Projects that don’t build in listening sessions or surveys miss the chance to adjust or hear folks concerns so that they can be addressed. And then people feel unheard and that leads to disengagement.

And leadership alignment is a huge one. If leaders aren’t a lot aligned, the project team gets mixed signals. That causes confusion and confusion can slow down everything.

It is never too late to introduce change management

So just like you put in chat, you’re like, we know this, we’re living it. What can we do? It’s never too late to introduce change management. You’re probably going to hear me say that 10 times during this webinar. We can’t go back and start over, but we can start now and change the ending. If your project is already under way or even live and no one is using the tool or struggling to use the tool, you can still make a difference. It doesn’t mean you’re stuck. Here’s how to get things back on track.

Create the vision. Clearly communicate where we are heading. What is the new world we are trying to work towards?

Re-engage with your stakeholders. Go back to the people who are impacted. Ask them what’s going on. You’ll often find that they have ideas and energy, they just weren’t asked.

Assess readiness and endorse sentiment. A quick pulse survey or a few listening sessions can uncover hidden resistance or confusion. Take the pulse of your team. Are they confused, frustrated, hopeful, unsure? This gives you a roadmap for where to focus your efforts. And maybe it’s that person that doesn’t want to lose the knowledge because they are central to their team. Let’s coach them. Let’s ensure we set them up to feel that way in the new world. There are coaching plans that we can develop and empower managers and supervisors to help folks along. But we need to know that that’s the problem so we can address it.

Create a mini change plan. You don’t need to start from scratch. There are frameworks you can borrow from Build. We have resources on our website. But really, just sketch out a lightweight plan. What’s the change? Who’s impacted? How are we going to support them? What are our intervention techniques? Who owns those? And when are they going to happen? And then apply structure to adoption planning.

Develop clear expectations and measurable outcomes to guide and evaluate user adoption efforts.

How to put change management into practice?

So maybe you’re now saying to yourself, I get it. I need to accomplish those things, and I need to start now, but how do I accomplish those things? How do I create the vision? A great way to do that is to conduct a change vision session or use a change vision board to clearly communicate the vision of the new world. This tool helps everyone understand the change by outlining the current state, the future state, the case for change, the drivers for change, and the barriers we face, and an opportunity to brainstorm how we overcome those.

How do we re-engage stakeholders? Utilize tools like the stakeholder matrix and listening sessions to bring people back into the conversation. These tools help identify who is impacted by the change and gather valuable feedback.

How do we assess readiness and sentiment? Leverage a quick survey to check how people are feeling, how ready they are. How do they feel about what’s going on today? This will give you insight to see where people are struggling, where they’re ready, and where we need to put attention and focus.

How do we create a mini change plan? Well, again, you’re welcome to use build templates available on our website, but I’ll also talk you through in a bit how to build one, where again, you’re just focus on what’s the change, what’s impacted, what support they’ll need, what support interventions make sense for this project, what support interventions make sense for our organization.

Some folks won’t attend an in-person or a virtual training, but put up some training videos and they’re good to go. Some like job aids, some like printouts. You have to think through the ones that are really going to land for the folks that you’re engaged with. It also helps you think through communications. Cut over planning, training, support, change champion network. Support structures are so important because they help people succeed in the new world. There are tools like office hours, job aids, sustainment plans. As the goal is to really make sure people know where to go for help.

And then finally, how do I apply structure to adoption planning, develop an adoption plan? This will help define clear expectations of use, as well as of leadership modeling, lots of different things. Folks know what’s expected of them, and it will define measurable outcomes. You can track if those things are happening, and plan interventions if they’re not. This plan will really help guide and evaluate the user adoption.

Create the vision

So, digging in, again, a great place to start is with the vision. Where are we going? Do folks need help seeing that? What I really, really like to do, this is one of my favorite change management exercises, is using a virtual whiteboard, or a real whiteboard if you’re able to be in person, use it for this exercise. And what we’re doing is we’re really creating a visual framework that shows what’s changing, how it’s changing, and kind of mapping out a roadmap for the journey to where we get from, where we are today, to where we want to be.

So, we outline the current and future state. We clearly explain, okay, this is where we are now. Over here, this is where we want to be. You can see that kind of what we need to do. We’re at the boarding point. What does the destination look like? Create transparency by being open about the drivers and the case for change. Let everyone know why this change is happening, why it’s happening now, and why it’s important.

And most importantly, acknowledge the challenges. Talk about the obstacles we might face and how we can overcome them together. It’s important to address any concerns and show that we have a plan to tackle them. When we openly discuss the obstacles we’re facing and explore solutions together, it creates a shared ownership. That sense of investment can inspire greater motivation and collaboration to help us move forward. And all of that means engagement, and that’s what we need to be successful.

We had a client, the organization brought us in because their Salesforce solution wasn’t working for them. Adoption was low, the impact was limited. When they came to us, we suspected the issue was not the solution. It wasn’t Salesforce. We thought it was rooted in change management and stakeholder engagement. And while we did identify some configuration improvements and some things that we could do to enhance the solution, we realized it was really a change management project.

And unfortunately, as we were working with them through this, and we said this is a change management project, they acknowledged that, they acknowledged the issues. We noticed the familiar problem. There were really only two people involved in the implementation. And unsurprisingly, those were the two people actively using the system. We raised concerns, we talked to leadership, we put it on the risk log, but it was acknowledged, but the behavior didn’t change, and the rollout was continuing.

And we knew we were setting them up to not be successful. So, we hit the brakes. We facilitated a change vision board session with the larger cross-functional team. And it really helped the team visualize, okay, here’s the future state, oh, wait, I’m in there and I’m not participating, and I really don’t have any investment in this, and I don’t know they’re making decisions about things that I’m going to be impacted by. And it really helped them crystallize that they needed to do things different to be successful.

We also facilitated conversations about the barriers to broader involvement, from time constraints to unclear roles. And together, we explored practical ways to overcome those challenges. And what that really did was introduce ownership and engagement into the process, which was a real turning point for the project. We ended up, you know, taking a much more strategic approach to the implementation, and we’re a lot more successful at the end because of it. And so that’s one way that that tool is really successful.

Engage Stakeholders

Once we have our vision, we can look at the who.

Who are those impacted? Let’s start by mapping out who’s impacted by this change. I like to use the stakeholder matrix to do this because it’s easy to overlook people. And a stakeholder matrix really makes you sit down and focus and look at everybody who’s involved. You spend time identifying who’s impacted, you understand their motivators and resistance. Most importantly, you ensure representation. You ensure that there’s somebody involved in the project that represents them.

And it’s a clear line that they know who to go to and that they have somebody on the project involved in the project that’s representing their needs. It also is really useful to inform communication and how and who we need to engage with. We had a client, it was an arts and cultural organization, and they rolled out a new ticketing system, but they did not involve all roles in the selection and the initial design of the tool.

When this client reached the testing phase, they began involving all the roles that had to touch the system upon go live, and needless to say, it did not go well. That’s when they reached out to us, and again, they reached out to us saying, uh-oh, we’ve implemented this ticketing system, and apparently, it’s not going to work for us.

Staff claimed that the system was not designed to work for them and believed it couldn’t be fixed. They believed there’s no way that this, one of the best in breed softwares, could work for them because it just couldn’t, it could not meet their needs at all. So, the organization reached out to us, asked us to help re-engage stakeholders, try to build trust, frame it as change management.

And of course, the core issue wasn’t the system. The system could meet all the needs. Yes, there were some tweaks that we did to configuration, but it was really about that key voices hadn’t been included in the implementation, and they didn’t understand how the system worked, and they didn’t understand that folks were making decisions thinking about those processes, and maybe they don’t have the deep knowledge that these folks have, but they were represented in the process, but it wasn’t communicated or told or anything like that.

So, we developed a stakeholder matrix to ensure we had the lay of the land of everyone that was going to be impacted by the system and made sure that we brought them, or really a representative that they were well aware of to the table. We conducted a design validation exercise with those previously excluded.

Again, we did have to make some minor configuration changes, which actually went a long way because then they got a little validation that like, yes, I did have to be brought to the table. But the system was really already capable. They just hadn’t seen it. They hadn’t been involved. They hadn’t had a voice.

So, we re-initiated testing. We re-the time, this time, everyone had already, you know, been part of our design revalidation. They were ready for testing. The process moved forward smoothly. And it was a big lesson learned for the organization on what to do next time. Because really, there’s a lot of battle of like, how inclusive are we going to be on this project? Because we want to be nimble and we want to move quickly.

But unfortunately, it doesn’t mean we have to include everyone. Everyone just has to be represented and know how they’re represented because inclusion is not optional. It’s essential for adoption and success. And once we know who are impacted, let’s listen to them.

This is a great way to reach the folks beyond the project team. The project team or those involved in the project are representatives of a larger stakeholder group. A way to reach those stakeholders groups are listening sessions. We can learn what do they need. We can use listening sessions to give them a voice. It’s really important to not approach listening sessions as a checkbox to be checked off as part of the process because they have to rebuild trust and there has to be authenticity seen in the way we conduct them. We need to show that we care about the concerns that are being raised and that it’s not just what project leadership should think should happen.

It’s really about seeing things through your team’s eyes. Their feedback helps us understand what’s really going on from their perspective because empathy goes a long way. When people feel heard, they’re more likely to get on board. I like to ask questions like what’s helping you now, what’s getting in your way. That’s how we find out what they need to help move them forward.

I also really like the trick of putting a QR code in the listening session, you know, facilitation presentation. And I put three sample questions, and I think three is appropriate, no more than five because you want folks to be engaged in the session. But I put three sample questions that you can use. And it just lets folks share feedback right in the session. You reach some of those folks that won’t complete a change readiness survey. And it really allows everybody’s voice to be front and center.

Carolyn Woodard: Can I just jump in quickly, Debbie? A couple of questions about that, about listening sessions.

Because in some of my past roles, I have had the feeling that sometimes leadership can be afraid to do that type of a session because what if it comes up with like 20 good things that would help make the tool work better and you can’t do all 20 things?

Can you talk a little bit about how do you handle that, the expectations of the people that you get to come to the listening and tell you what’s working and what’s not working versus what you are going to be able to do to address their concerns?

Debbie Cameron: It’s a great question because inevitably things are going to come up. And, you know, one thing that I think came up in some of our answers to the registration was scope creep. 

And what a way to invite scope creep when we let everybody start suggesting, well, I wanted this or I thought it would address membership and we’re not going to get that. And what about our volunteers? I didn’t hear about volunteer management. Those things are going to exist whether you air them out in a listening session or not.

So, bringing them out and again, creating that transparency and letting folks have a voice, that’s great. That’s what’s going to help build that foundation of trust. That’s what’s going to help get rid of the, they care about this team more than they care about my team.

And what needs to be part of the listening session are some talking points prepared so that leadership can lean on to say, we can’t accomplish everything about this. We can’t accomplish, we can’t solve all 863 problems of our organization. Right now, we are trying to solve these.

And the good thing about creating that vision board is we have the mission of this project kind of in where we’re trying to get to. And yes, we want to address the volunteer management system. We hear you. We have it in the roadmap. We’re actively, you know, it’s on our list. We’re actively working through.

But the drivers in the case for change that we worked out about why we’re doing this and more importantly, why we’re doing this now, we have those things to speak to so that, again, we’re not going to make these folks happy because we’re not giving them what they want. But we’re helping them understand that our technology strategy has to be part of our organizational strategy and part of that organizational strategy are these drivers in case for change. And this is why we have to do this now. But we hear you, we it’s on our radar screen. We’re going to address it. And just validating them goes a long way.

That answers the question?

Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I think so. And this is a great question also to kind of pivot a little bit and address a question in the chat, which is where someone says they have a lot of trust and vision and they have some sub teams that are working together, but the budget is not there.

They know what they want to do, but they don’t have the money to do it. And I would say probably in that case, too, you need to start small, start with what can be done, but when you have that bigger vision, though you know where you’re going to at the end of the road, you can both communicate that to funders, like here’s where we want to get to, and here’s the steps that we’re going to take, but also can convey it to the people that are working on it.

It’s like, look, we all want to get to five steps ahead from where we are now, but we’re going to have to do step one first, and then step two, and then step three, etc.

Debbie Cameron: And taking off those chunks and talking about them in those chunks I think is really helpful, because it feels, I mean, we can’t get to, most organizations don’t have the resources or capacity, quite honestly, to get to where they wish they could be, where they want to be.

But talking about those in those small chunks, and Carolyn, you brought up a great point about when you have these things teed up, and you know that, you know these needs, there are funding opportunities that pop up. And if you have the information organized, and these needs have been communicated and prioritized in those chunks that you were talking about, then you’re ready to go when that funding opportunity pops on your desk, and you won’t miss it, because those often come in with like a 30 day, we have to spend the money in 30 days type thing. At least that’s been my experience when clients have come to us and been like, we’ve just got this money. Thank you for those questions.

Readiness and Sentiment

So, readiness and sentiment. We know who’s impacted. We’ve heard some things in a listening session. We’ve also had the opportunity to have a dialogue in the listening session. But you do want to give the private space for folks to really be able to communicate in a more detailed way than they could in a listening session, and a more private way than they could in a listening session about how they’re feeling.

We want to ask how they’re doing. We want to ask if the system hasn’t been rolled out yet, like, are you feeling ready? If you’re not, tell us why. What are we not doing to make you feel like you’re going to be successful? Are you just confused? Are you frustrated? Let’s assess that before we go any further. It doesn’t have to be a long survey.

I put the Build Change Readiness Gold Standard Survey that we would use at the beginning of a large initiative. These are kind of the categories that we would ask questions in, but it doesn’t have to be that. It can be a short baseline survey to just check in and figure out where folks are so that we can take their temperature later and understand if the efforts and the actions we’re taking are making a difference, or if we’re totally missing the mark.

Another thing I love to do, and mostly because it lands with leadership, is I love taking the survey data and creating visualizations of survey results to show team sentiments and readiness.

You can use heat maps and dashboards, but that tends to really land and help guide decisions. It’s a great way to easily spot where we need to focus our energy, where we need to put our time and support, so we’re not just guessing and just saying, okay, we need to train and we need to do it this way, and we think this will be the most successful.

And again, there’s many ways to execute a change readiness survey. The important takeaway here is to just make sure we’re gauging sentiment and readiness. We use what we learn from the survey to inform training, communication and coaching. And it allows us to establish a baseline to measure progress.

Carolyn Woodard: Just jump in to say I was at a session a day or two ago about using AI to take information like this to put into a visual. So, it’s one of those areas that I think, you know, once you’ve got this information, if you do want to make some kind of graphic or visual aid for other people in your organization, it’s getting a lot more easy. It’s getting a lot easier to do that.

Debbie Cameron: That’s really cool. I like that. Thank you for sharing that.

Technology Change Management Plan

And then once we have these outputs that we’ve gotten from the discussions on our change vision board, we have outputs from our listening sessions, outputs from our change readiness survey, we can build a plan that helps meet people where they are, helps figure out what techniques, what support things do we need to put in place to guide them through this.

And a change plan doesn’t, it’s not about, let’s fancy plan. It looks great. It’s final. It’s a living, breathing thing. There’s lots of components.

I put in the components of the Builds Change Management Plan. And you don’t need all of this. But you really just want to make sure your change plan is set up to dig into what’s changing and provide transparency into the efforts that are being put forward and organize those efforts and assign ownership of those efforts to support the transition and make sure that all of those are in alignment with our long-term objectives so that we’re working towards the right thing.

So again, on the next slide, we’re going to dig into each of the categories that Build uses in their change plan. But if you’re currently underway or you’re already live, the key takeaway here is don’t wait for the perfect plan. Even the simplest, lightweight plan with clear actions, and most importantly, owners can make a huge difference.

Start small and build as you go, because progress beats perfection every time.

Change Framework

Now, if you want to do the big, very thorough change management plan, the components that we think are important are having a change framework to approach this. That basically means outlining the foundational structure and methodology which guides the change process. It’s typically aligned with a recognized model like Adkar or Kotter, and it sets the stage for how change will be approached.

On the next slide, I’ll walk you through Build’s Change Management Plan, because I like it because it can be the right size for your organization.

Change Journey

Change journey is about the emotional side. It’s about the stakeholder’s experience that’s associated with the journey that they’re making to go through this change. And what it does is it helps us visualize the progression of the change from their perspective, because change often evokes emotional responses in people.

And so figuring out which emotion is coming when just helps you figure out a more appropriate communication or coaching, or maybe it’s time to step back and be a little quiet.

Approach & Timeline

Approach, what is our strategy to lead the change? This is what really needs to be tailored or specific to your organization or project, because it needs to be things that work in the culture of your organization and tailored to the complexity of the change.

Timeline, pretty self-explanatory.

Tools

Tools and intervention techniques. These are the tools and resources that you’ll use throughout the change process to engage with those impacted. If you only do this part of the change plan, huge, wonderful, successful. Well, this is the timeline. Timeline is important too. But it’s about the training, the communications, the coaching. Are you setting up a change champions network? Are you setting up power users? What are your support constructs? Things like that.

Management & Oversight

Then finally, management and oversight. That’s again really about assigning that ownership and making sure that we have an understanding of who’s doing what and when.

Build Consulting Change Management Framework

I reference Build Consulting’s framework as an example. We built this framework because we find you can scale it to small changes or large changes and really, it comes down to four phases.

Define success.

What are we trying to achieve? Where are we trying to go? Do we have a clear vision of that? Have we clearly communicated that? It’s all that change vision that we talked about earlier.

Impacts

Then it’s about understanding the impacts. Have we truly dug into what’s changing? Have we identified who will be affected by the change and how? Getting into the weeds here for them is important. Focus on activities that ensure that all potential impacts are understood and addressed.

Engage.

Engage with stakeholders in an effective way. This is about those intervention techniques. How are we doing it? When are we doing it? Do they know it’s coming? It’s very important that they know that we’re putting effort and planning into making sure they’re supported.

Iterate

And then iterate, continuously improve, because we learn through everything we do, and the FIAC loops that we set up help us learn and help us iterate.

Adoption Plan

And then finally, let’s ensure they adopt and thrive. We have the change plan in place. How do we ensure people actually use the system? The answer is the adoption plan. How do I build an adoption plan? What is an adoption plan?

An adoption plan outlines strategies to ensure users embrace the new system, providing them with the necessary resources, training and support throughout the transition. 

So again, I have the sections of Builds typical adoption plan outlined here. But if you’re already on your way or live and we’re onboarding folks, let’s just focus on the purple boxes, which are our short-term change objectives.

Because if we’re late in the project, or again, if we’ve already gone live, the focus should be on how can we make things happen in the short-term. The actions needed to gain some momentum with our stakeholders and get them engaged with the project, or get them onboarding to the new system.

Short-term Change Objectives

KPI Tracking and Evaluation

Typical elements focused on short-term objectives are KPI tracking and evaluation. This is where we define exactly how we’re going to measure success in the short-term. This is where we set up a system for tracking. What are our key, like how do we know people are engaging with the system or engaging with the project? Outline some goals, define some metrics associated with those goals, some targets and milestone dates to ensure that we’re moving towards our target, and clear evaluation criteria to see that we’re making some progress.

User Satisfaction Surveys

User satisfaction surveys, we have our baseline. We want to check in with users to see how they’re feeling as this goes along to make sure we’re actually making a difference, to make sure we’re moving the needle. This helps us understand their experience and helps us address things quickly.

Leadership Alignment & Actions

Leadership alignment is always a critical component. They play a crucial role in championing the change and communicating the change and supporting the change, but they need to model the behavior. And setting those expectations and defining those things in the adoption plan helps them know what they’re supposed to be doing and what the expectation is of them to help this project be successful.

Adoption Risk Log

And then at Risk Log, it’s always great to just keep risks out in front of us, talk about them, develop mitigation strategies. It just helps us stay ahead of things before they hit.

What if I Inherited a Mess?

Okay, so what if I walked into a project or I’m in a project that’s a mess and it’s off-track, what would I do? Because some of you may be saying at this point, thanks for all this information, Debbie, but that was a lot. Can you just distill this? What do I need to do in the next week, in the next month?

I encourage you not to panic. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but take a deep breath and remember that every problem has a solution.

Start by clearly communicating the vision. It’s important to do it in a visual way.

Build a stakeholder matrix. This tool will help you identify who is impacted and make sure you understand kind of where they are in the process.

Hold a listening session. These are great for understanding the concerns and needs of your team, and it’s really about rebuilding trust and showing that you care about their input.

Leverage a survey. This will give you a clear picture of how folks are feeling where they are. How can we re-engage them? Meet them where they are. Hopefully, it highlights areas that need extra support.

And then identify quick wins. Use all of the outputs from this to look for small, achievable goals that can quickly demonstrate progress and rebuild confidence in the project.

Carolyn Woodard: I feel like when you, when it wasn’t your project, when you’re coming into a situation, like maybe you’re the new IT director or you’re the new database manager or whatever it is, you can do those listening sessions, right? You have a different kind of leeway, there’s a different vibe where you’re just like, help me help you, what doesn’t work with this tool?

And it can help get a lot of opinions out that maybe they wouldn’t have told the original person who was gung-ho on this tool.

Debbie Cameron: I mean, talk about a great way to get quick context of where things are. A listening session is a great way to do that.

It’s Never Too Late to Introduce Change Management.

Again, start small. Begin with manageable steps that can show quick results. Anything to help build confidence and gain some momentum.

Iterate. Show that you are pivoting. Show that you are reactive to the information you’re collecting. You’re not just plowing forward whether folks are communicating with you or not. Continuously improve and adapt your approach based on the feedback and results. It’s all about learning and evolving.

And build trust. Focus on transparent communication, collaboration, on problem solving, and involve your team in the process. Trust is really key to any success, but definitely to change management success.

Mini Case Study: Turning a Project Around After Launch

So a real life example about how we turn things around. A lot of it’s going to sound familiar because I employed a lot of what we talked about today. After there was a system launch, an organization came to us. They had worked on a CRM implementation and adoption just was not happening.

So instead of pushing harder, they pivoted. They said, we’re going to engage some change management expertise, which went a really long way with their staff because they were like, okay, they understand we need help and we don’t know what we’re doing.

And the first thing we noticed was confusion. So we did the change vision session. We brought everyone together to talk about what success looked like. We made it visual. We made it collaborative. We did it virtually. During a listening session, we presented that vision board back to a broader group. And it made it easy for folks to share feedback.

We had a QR code, tell us what you think. Really understood where people were struggling. People were very honest and transparent, and they really were open to this format. And we didn’t try to fix everything at once. We set short-term goals, and we were honest with them about that. And we rolled out practical support. We did office hours, lunch and learns, job aids, and leadership really delivered, because they started modeling the behavior.

We put together an adoption plan with expectations of every role in the organization, including leadership, and they did what we asked of them. And we kept the conversation going. We set up feedback loops, so concerns and ideas could surface, and we could keep improving. And the results, people felt hard supported, and they started using the system. It wasn’t the gold standard use that they had dreamed about for the long-term objective.

They did get there later, but it was about short-term wins and progress.

Resources from Build Consulting

So I’ll share our link to our change management resources, some of which I referenced earlier. Check them out. Hopefully, you’ll find them helpful.

And please, just an invitation to follow us on LinkedIn. And of course, if you’re interested in learning about how Build can support your next technology project, please email sales at buildconsulting.com.

Q&A

Carolyn Woodard: There’s a couple of questions that came in at registration. So, some of them, I think you’ve already answered.

But one that I thought was interesting was if you are in a organization where their culture has maybe never heard of change management, how do you have some advice on how to introduce, you’ve just gone over a whole bunch of concepts and tools and like a standard procedure that you go through that is change management.

How do you introduce this whole philosophy of change management to an organization that maybe has never heard of it?

Debbie Cameron: I like to use the term people are the hardest part of a change. And I think if you Google that saying, you will find, no, I joke. I think it lands. I think if you talk about the people side, if you talk about the fact that if we don’t get folks on board, and if we don’t get folks brought along, it lands.

And I think if you just, there’s tons of resources on ProSci too, that distill this down. But I think if you just start talking about the people side of the change, and struggling and frame it in that way, it will really go a long way. It will land for folks.

Carolyn Woodard: All right. Well, I think let’s go ahead and go back over our learning objectives, because we’re almost at time.

So we were hoping that by the end of this hour with Debbie, we would understand a lot more about change management techniques, which thank you so much, Debbie, for sharing your experience and your decade and more of experience with this and using these techniques at nonprofits, because we could really just hear your experience and your explanation.

Learning why technology tools and projects fail. And I want to emphasize again, like at businesses, at small businesses, at nonprofit. Nonprofits don’t have like the lock on technology tools not working out perfectly. So don’t feel like this is always a problem at nonprofits. But there are a lot of reasons at nonprofits why some of this can happen. And I think we went over that pretty well.

Discussing what you can do, still do later in a technology project. I love that you had those couple slides there about like, I inherited a mess. Now what do I do?

Learning some tools and tactics to re-engage the team. I love the ideas of the listening, doing the surveys, just really trying to get a handle on what is not working.

And then never forgetting to do that vision. You know, like doing the visioning board, doing a vision meeting where you can get everybody to say, like, here’s where we’re trying to get to. Remember? Here’s where we’re trying to get to. Really, really help when you encounter those roadblocks along the way.

And then I love the real-world success stories that you had.

I have a little quick anecdote back to, I said that I was at this place that had Raiser’s Edge that was just, like, way too much of a tool for what we were able to do. And our executive director used his Rolodex. Like, he had a Rolodex, like, 40 years of contacts and major donors, etc. And he had no intention of ever putting any of his contacts in the CRM that they had made this big investment in. So, if you have leadership who’s not using it, not willing to use it, it’s very hard to convince everybody else that they’re going to use it and it’s going to be great. So, that’s my little real-world success story.

Debbie Cameron: A good one.

Carolyn Woodard: I want to make sure before we end to invite everyone back to our webinar next month, which is Cybersecurity Essentials for Nonprofits. You can register on our website right now, which is communityit.com.

This is a question we get a lot of what are the five to ten essentials that any nonprofit of any size and any mission should have in terms of cybersecurity. So, we’re going to have this panel next month of our own CTO and cybersecurity expert, Matt Eschelman, and our good friend and cybersecurity expert, Ian Gottesman, who is from NGO ISAC. They’re an association of nonprofits that share best practices and know-how around cybersecurity. And so, they’re going to talk about a few trends and current issues and they’re going to take audience Q&A on cybersecurity essentials.

I want to make sure if you’re not a tech person, please don’t worry that this webinar will be hard to understand. Both of these people are just great at talking about these complicated concepts in ways that I can understand. So, if I can understand it, I know that you’ll be able to understand it.

It’s on Wednesday, October 15th at 3 p.m. Eastern, noon Pacific. And as I said, you can register on our site now and check out communityit.com for all of our past webinar videos to register for any upcoming webinars. I’m going to put in the chat the link to the Reddit, which is r/NonprofitITManagement/. We’re going to go over there and answer a few more questions if you have them.

And Debbie, I just want to thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise, maybe introducing to some people this idea of change management, helping people see practical ways that they can, some actual steps that they can take to try and rescue those projects. So thank you so much.

Debbie Cameron: Thanks for having me.