July 15, 2024 | Case Study, Change Management
The Challenge
A global organization with a reputation as the world’s fastest growing premium spirits company was experiencing problems keeping pace with the expectations of their consumers for continuously bringing new and exciting products to the market. The Supply Chain Team, tasked with improving overall speed to market, determined that the lack of end-to-end processes and tools were critical gaps in their capabilities. Stronger alignment and integration between the Research and Development and Supply Chain teams would be crucial to sustainable success in delivering against consumer expectations.
To that end, the company launched a search for a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) System that would bring efficiencies to R&D and integrate with Supply Chain tools for improved visibility and transparency. Horizontal integration promised a seamless end-to-end process with better utilization of data across R&D, packaging, sales, and marketing.
Executive sponsorship was strong, and the case for change supported a compelling return on investment. Unfortunately, the company had a dubious history with transformational change. The culture appeared more focused on perceived constraints that process, and structure might have on creativity and fresh ideas.
What the company needed was a change management partner that would bring a disciplined approach to organize and prioritize leadership engagement and socialize the case for change. The changes would need to be promoted through an integrated program that incorporated communication and training, all while ensuring the impacted users received the training and confidence needed to sustain the change in the long-term.
The Solution
Initial discovery sessions identified key risks, mapped impacted stakeholders, and road mapped the overall change strategy. Those artifacts were critical inputs for the planning, enablement, and execution phases of the change program.
Planning Phase – Confirming what we know, combined with an upfront focus on what is unknown and should be planned for.
A project journey map was created that visually captured all workstreams and milestones. Insights from the discovery sessions were leveraged to inform organizational impacts, the change management plan, and communication strategy. In light of the company’s history with transformational initiatives, creating awareness and the desire to embrace change were critical objectives of the communication strategy. A communication campaign was designed to reach diverse audiences by utilizing a combination of modalities (e.g., video, plant flyers, website) to highlight five core themes instrumental to the success of driving a culture change.
Enablement Phase – Mobilizing the business to drive the change effort forward.
Leadership action plans were activated to engage leaders and maximize the value of their positive influence throughout the organization. In parallel, a Change Agent Network with broad functional representation was formed and trained as an extension of the project team to share information outward and collect feedback for the project team.
