Managing Organizational Change for the Implementation Project

Play the video to get some background information on the research by McKinsey.

• McKinsey, 2020, How do we manage the change journey?
• McKinsey, 2019, Getting personal about change

In his 2004 book, The Power of Intuition, Gary Klein devised a "premortem analysis" procedure to help teams develop the ability to quickly adapt to changing situations as exceptions over the course of a project. The idea came from a study conducted at the University of Colorado that found prospective hindsight, where you imagine an event has already occurred, can increase a person's ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by up to 30 percent.

A premortem comes at the beginning of a project, so the team can anticipate potential issues that could happen and develop resolutions in advance. If and when any of those problems occur during the project, the team can quickly and easily implement the resolution previously identified.

This is how Gary Klein describes the procedure:

"Start by assuming [your] undertaking has failed spectacularly. Then, over the next few minutes, write down every reason you can think of for the failure […]. Then, revisit your plans in light of the pitfalls you've uncovered, and generate ideas as to how you can minimize their likelihood of occurring or avoid them altogether. Klein also recommends that you periodically review your premortem list as you make progress."

To support a successful SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation, SAP provides organizational change management guidance and templates in the Solution Adoption workstream of the SAP Activate Methodology to do the following:

• Conduct a Cloud Mindset Assessment & determine follow-up actions
  • To assess a company's present situation and readiness for a cloud solution
• Manage Organizational Change Management (OCM) tasks end-to-end
  • To support partner consultants and customers complete tasks such as setting up an OCM team, analyzing and planning activities, conducting continuous change management, and others that need to be completed at key implementation phases throughout the project (and after).
• Identify & engage stakeholders
  • To identify key individuals at different levels of the organization critical to the success of the project
• Conduct Change Impact Analyses and determine follow-up actions
  • To assess existing mindsets based on perceived impact of the new solution and potential issues
• Conduct Learning Needs Analysis and design an enablement strategy
  • To identify training requirements to ensure all employees are fully prepared and enabled for the new solution

Select Learn more to receive further information about the different stakeholder levels.

Play the video to learn how to identify the key stakeholders for successful project implementation.

There are many benefits to a public cloud solution, including:

• Lowest TCO: Leveraging software-as-a-service to minimize - and in some cases eliminate - costs related to infrastructure, implementation, maintenance and upgrades. Benchmarks show that cloud solutions are at least 30% less costly than other deployment types.
• Easy to scale: In the cloud, you can grow (or shrink) your software footprint easily based on the needs of the organization.
• Speed of innovation: With multiple releases a year, a cloud solution helps ensure you get the latest innovations instantly.
• Simplification and standardization: The predefined processes and packaged content in a SaaS solution simplifies and standardizes the landscape.
• Easy to replicate and deploy: In the cloud, your software can be deployed globally or replicated in a matter of minutes.

To make an SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation successful, we need to move away from the traditional "Fit-Gap" on-premise mindset to the Fit-to-Standard Cloud mindset.

Note

A "Gap" is a difference between what the system DOES and what the customer NEEDS it to do.

The purpose of the Change Impact Analysis Process is to identify the impact of changes associated with the implementation project on the organization. This enables you to develop a change management plan to meet the requirements of stakeholders and support a smooth transition to the new system. To get a visual "heat map" overview of the varying degrees of impact different areas of the business will experience, use the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Change Impact Analysis.xlsx accelerator.

Assessing all types of change impact:

• What organizational transition activities need to be executed to prepare the organization for the identified change impacts?
  • Change of job descriptions, incentive system, goal setting, re-organization
• How is the change network designed to meet the requirements of identified change impacts?
  • Number of change agents, timeline of change agent network activities, required skill set of change agents?
• What specific activities are needed to ensure the right level of stakeholder engagement is in place to identify the change impact to the organization?
  • Involvement, commitment, awareness
• What kind of communication is required to prepare the organization for the identified change impacts?
  • Communication needs, communication channels, communication timeline, key messages
• What learning is needed to prepare each stakeholder group for the upcoming changes?
  • Training topics, delivery methods, duration, transactional scope, business knowledge, process knowledge, system knowledge
  • We recommend discussing the change impact after each business process is demonstrated/discussed during the Fit-to-Standard workshops with customer business process experts, as this is when the new way versus old way differences will be fresh in everyone's minds.
• What further activities are required to plan, execute and to prepare the organization for the upcoming change?
  • Could there be any other change impacts? Consider everything that could possibly go wrong, and brainstorm solutions.

The goal of the learning needs analysis is to ensure the right learning is readily available at the time of need. The focus is on intuitive, consumer focused content, activities and deployment methods that are directly relevant to the learner's daily life. The change impact of the new solution is important in understanding the enablement needs of all stakeholders in the organization. All training resources should be evaluated, including SAP enablement content, and documentation customers have for processes in the legacy system.

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For additional information, review these deliverables in the SAP Roadmap Viewer:

• Enablement Assessment
• Learning Needs Analysis for Users

Through the SAP Enable Now content tool, SAP has developed many predelivered tutorials for standard business processes and made them available in the Web Assistant in SAP S/4HANA. End-users can access enablement and support any time by selecting the question mark icon in the top right corner of the launchpad. Delivering training content within the SAP S/4HANA applications provides support to end-users when they need it, in-context of the current task. Easily accessible enablement improves user adoption of a solution and increases productivity, as it takes less time to get employees up-to-speed on the new solution. If a customer has best practices in their system that have not been customized, there may be a predelivered tutorial that can be used at no additional cost. To create your own custom tutorials or download the standard tutorial packages and edit, a license to SAP Enable Now is required.

Click through the tutorial below to get an experience of an SAP Enable Now tutorial, while also learning how to access embedded help in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

ExerciseStart Exercise

With a license to SAP Enable Now, you can create, maintain and deliver effective training and enablement assets where learners can easily find them. Create content once, and reuse it across multiple learning scenarios, and provide contextual knowledge and guidance by embedding tutorials directly in an application. You can also add videos, animations, or detailed and interactive software simulations easily with the Enable Now Producer. SAP Enable Now is supported for both on-premise and cloud deployments.

Learn more about SAP Enable Now

Learn how to use SAP Enable Now in the SAP Help Portal

Find tutorials, templates, and other materials that can be used with SAP Enable Now in the SAP Enable Now Info Center

There are a multitude of enablement resources on SAP Learning Hub. Start with an SAP Learning Journey to identify the training course(s) relevant to your interests. Complete e-learning courses 24x7x365 via Learning Hub and join expert-led live training sessions offered through the SAP Learning Rooms. If your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Learning Journey leads to certification, revisit the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Implementation Learning Room to find the quarterly "stay current" release information and complete a short assessment to keep your knowledge up-to-date. You can also ask questions and collaborate with SAP experts and your peers through the SAP Learning Rooms.

Note

Check which SAP Learning Hub edition(s) you have with the following steps:

1. Navigate to the SAP Training website.
2. Select the icon in the top right corner to log in.
3. Select the same icon in the top right corner and choose the Access purchased subscriptions option.
4. Your subscriptions are displayed.

Note

For technical issues with SAP Learning Hub or SAP Learning Rooms, submit a ticket in the User Support Center.