Managing Enterprise Technology Change

Transitioning to a new ERP, this Australian oil and gas giant moved quickly to augment their change management capability with technology expertise.

Managing technology change internationally: transitioning to a new enterprise resource planning software

Like many organisations, our client in the oil and gas industry has been faced with the challenge of transitioning to a new ERP in response to the ending of maintenance support for SAP ECC in 2027. They chose to implement SAP S/4HANA.

The challenges: misaligned business and technology

As this organisation embarked upon the journey of delivering SAP S/4HANA, they faced a gap in the organisational change management (OCM) space. The challenge of this gap was evident in the disconnect between business and IT at a time of heightened necessity for the two to speak the same language.

The success of the project would be heavily influenced by how well business and technology could communicate and understand each other’s perspectives.

The organisation needed to avert problems that are common to a project of this scale and complexity, e.g.:

technology moving into execution too quickly, without effectively engaging the business stakeholders who needed to come on the journey.
technology struggling to interpret the change into the business, leading to broken communication.
the business underestimating the technical effort required by their demands.
the business omitting to involve the Service Desk from the moment of going into hypercare.

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The strategy: engage change leaders who understand technology

Such challenges could be pre-empted and avoided by ensuring the project’s change management team had a strong understanding of both business and technology. In addition, OCM needed to have a seat at the table right beside the project’s key stakeholders.

Many change managers have a strong business slant to their approach, and those who bring a technology lens are harder to come by. Our client was already familiar with JourneyOne’s strength in bridging the gap between business and IT, and so engaged our team to fill the technology gap in their OCM space.

The solution: a seat at the table and boots on the ground

JourneyOne Change Drivers are seasoned diplomats and interpreters in the middle ground between the business and technology. As a fresh set of eyes and ears, we were able to come into the OCM space of this ERP transition project and take a seat at the table to facilitate the symbiosis of business and technology.

Our approach was guided by our principles and values, particularly ‘Be Humble’: listen to what is going on; then, with comprehensive knowledge and understanding: ‘Always Deliver’.

Traditional change management can be very ‘by the book’ and may be able to give excellent guidance and advice. However, it often stops there, short of actually doing. Coming into the project, we rolled up our sleeves to work right alongside the client team, supporting them through a complex journey of global communications, stakeholder engagement, and hands-on hypercare.

The added remarkability from the JourneyOne team is a knack for problem solving. In one example from the hypercare and transition-to-support phase of this journey: our team saw the opportunity to facilitate earlier identification of technology problems by merging ambiguous service desk forms into one. This gave the IT team a full view of what was going on, rather than having information siloed by form type, thus improving dialogue, transparency and troubleshooting.