What is SAP’s understanding of Organizational Change Management

Organizational change management is often associated with the application of tools. And indeed, tools and templates help to reduce complexity and to give a structure to the people side of your cloud project.

However, tools only allow an approximation to the "real life". And even the best tools do not guarantee that organizational change management will be a success. Delivering organizational change management with sustainable impact requires the ability to really connect with people, to think beyond causal relations and have the entire system in mind – and to be empathetic.

Therefore, we are convinced that organizational change management is more than a check-box approach; it is an attitude.

Watch the video below for more details.

SAP’s organizational change management approach is fully aligned with SAP’s implementation methodology SAP Activate. The SAP Activate Methodology for cloud implementations is structured into six phases. The graphic below gives you an overview of the SAP Activate phases. You want to explore the purpose and key activities of each phase and the respective focus of organizational change management? Just open the related text fields!​

When you decide to implement a cloud solution, you decide to move towards a best-practice standard. You don’t start from scratch with identifying the needs and wishes of the users and then begin to develop a new solution that meets the requirements you have collected upfront. Thus, the degree of freedom in cloud projects is smaller compared to the development of a completely new software solution.

Nevertheless, with SAP Activate, SAP follows an agile approach for cloud implementations. This means that the project usually is structured into sprints. For example, the identification of gaps between specific business requirement and the cloud software or the integration of identified requirements into the cloud solution is conducted in an iterative approach.

Therefore, organizational change management should also be delivered in an agile way to fit to the project management methodology.

Watch the video below to discover options to support your cloud project with an agile organizational change management.