ERP Change Management: Preface

wet want to share our experiences with you in ERP change management field. If you continue reading these articles surely you will find them useful.

This document is prepared for those companies, which need to improve or implement any integrated system such as ERP, MIS, etc and want to manage the project from the people side point of view.

If you see change management books, all of them say good guidelines how to communicate, to build awareness, to foster desire, to make knowledge and so on. These principles are essential and should be followed by change management team and they should be aware of change management skills, supervising skills and so forth.

We can divide guidelines in these books to two main tasks, which should be done and followed by change management team and change stakeholders:

Behavioral tasks
Practical tasks

Behavioral tasks are those tasks that project team members, functional mangers and supervisors should follow them in connecting with people, in meetings, speaking etc. That means managerial and supervisory skills are absolutely required for these people and they have to use these skills when they want to communicate with their employees, pairs and colleagues.

Until now, everything goes smoothly. However, there arises one question: "we know every thing about communications, techniques and approaches, we are skilled in managerial and supervisory aspects, and we know how to handle meetings but actually what should we say in our meetings? If we want to make the awareness of the need for change, what should we say? If we have to tell employees the benefits, risks, objectives of making that change, what are these topics actually?"

That means beside the behavioral tasks, we have to do some practical tasks too. In other word, we, as project team members and change stakeholders, should know the answers to the previous sample questions and after that announce them to others.

In these document sets, we have chosen ADKAR, Prosci registered model for change management framework activities, and extracted questions in different phases of this model. Then these questions are answered regarding to the system you are implementing or improving in your organization.

Phases of this model, as mentioned by Prosci, are:

Awareness of the need for change
Desire to participate in the change
Knowledge about how to change
Ability to implement the change
Reinforcement to sustain the change

Therefore, we have tried to prepare a document, which helps companies facilitate and expedite their change management activities. This document is about inventory system and we can deliver in other systems such as: