Keeping Pace With Accelerated Change

For decades, this financial services leader has helped customers invest in their futures. Earning high praise for its heritage of innovation, the company provides financial services mainly in investor and advisory services. With branches across the U.S., the company has trillions in total client assets, millions in daily average trades, and millions of brokerage and banking accounts.

In the competitive, high-growth financial services sector, this firm has earned its place as one of the top investment management firms in the U.S. Success requires continually evolving—and changing—as a company. The company had been doing change management for a number of years, but only sporadically. “Change management existed in pockets, and we saw resistance and low adoption rates on important projects,” says the managing director of change management. “We needed the ability to apply change management in a consistent, standardized way.

Standardizing and building change capabilities

Leadership saw the importance of expanding  their organizational change capability. They recruited a managing director of change management to help build out a Change Management Center of Excellence (COE) from the ground up. Its mission: To execute change management for major projects, build a change community, and set the standards for others practicing change management across the firm. Prosci change management is central to the Change Management COE. Says the managing director, "We trust the Prosci Methodology because it’s grounded in scientific, real-world data gathered from companies around the world."

Elevating change management strategies

The managing director oversees a team of five change management leads. All are Prosci Certified Change Practitioners and several have attended Prosci’s Enterprise Change Management Boot Camp. She says, “We attended ECM Boot Camp to become better educated on how to support the firm broadly and grow change capabilities across the board.” In addition, numerous organizational change leaders have attended Prosci’s Change Management Sponsor Briefing, Strategic Alignment Workshop, and other Prosci workshops.

Expanding the change management footprint

Developing overall change capability required engagement and participation from individuals beyond the Change Management COE, leading to more people becoming Prosci Certified Change Practitioners. The company now has dedicated change management teams in several departments.

To date, the company has 131 Prosci Certified Change Practitioners across the company helping changes succeed. To further develop change capabilities, two change leaders have attended Prosci’s Train-the-Trainer Program and now deliver role-based change management programs internally. Also, to support and enable the growing change management function, the Change Management COE established a change community, which has grown to 150 individuals and meets monthly. 

Embedding change management into the culture

A Prosci Enterprise Change Management (ECM) License gives the change community access to a variety of Prosci’s change management tools and materials to further build capabilities and support their change management activities. With momentum building and recognizing the importance of change management in especially difficult times, development of the Change Management COE continued during COVID.

Change leaders performed all change management activities virtually, including changes related to transitioning to a remote workforce. COVID projects aside, the team still had other important, high-risk change management projects on their plate, such as a new timekeeping system and payroll process that would impact everyone in the organization.

Results

Successfully transitioning employees to new Workday platform

Operational efficiency is a top priority at the company. Their timekeeping system served its purpose for more than two decades, but no longer met the requirements of the business. They decided to implement Workday Time Tracking and Payroll solutions for a more modern, intuitive approach.

The new Workday platform would reduce the amount of time spent by individuals on timekeeping activities, streamline processes for the payroll team, and simplify the incorporation of new partners into the payroll system. However, it would shift payroll cycles from semi-monthly to bi-weekly, resulting in more frequent, smaller paychecks—an unwelcome change for some, plus everyone was experiencing change fatigue. People needed to adopt and learn how to use the new system in order to get paid, so effective change management was vital.

Proactive, structured change management

Change management activities based on the Prosci Methodology provided the structure and standardization needed to achieve project outcomes. Says the managing director,

"The Prosci Methodology is easy to understand, and the depth of the resources available in the Prosci Portal gives us much to draw from to support our change management efforts."

The core team for the project included the managing director, a change management project lead, plus training and communication resources. The project lead leveraged an Impact Assessment and other discovery insights to develop a change management strategy. They developed components of the Prosci Methodology such as the Sponsor Roadmap, Coaching Plan for people managers, and Communications Plan, and shared them with leaders across the company to educate them about the plan.

With the change management foundation in place on the Workday project, the change management team combined Prosci Methodology principles with their own innovative strategies to move the project forward. The team equipped people managers—who are vital to project success—with the tools and resources needed to support the project, such as a Manager’s Playbook that clarified the role and expectations for people managers, provided key messages for them to deliver, and more.

Applying the ADKAR Model

The team followed the Prosci ADKAR^® Model to help manage the change, knowing that developing Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement in every impacted individual are important elements to project success. To achieve these ADKAR outcomes, the team used strategies such as virtual roadshows, over 150 instructional and educational articles, and HR contact center support.

Reinforcement strategies included working with the development team on built-in Workday notifications and functionality to foster usage and adoption, plus the primary driver, getting paid through using the new system. Beyond the Workday project, the ADKAR Model and change management are embedded in the organizational culture. “Our organization really loves the ADKAR Model!,” says the project lead. “ADKAR resonates with our employees, which benefits every change project we work on.”

Positive results for adoption and usage

The company is happy with the results on the project. “The day the new Workday Time Tracking and Payroll platform went live we saw more activity than expected, and adoption has been great,” says the project lead.

Adds the managing director, “With our change agility increasing, we’re seeing much better adoption and less resistance on all of our projects because of our Prosci change management efforts. Prosci has greatly improved our approach to managing change, moving us well beyond simply communicating about the changes, to analyzing and understanding how the changes will impact our employees, and managing the changes accordingly.” 

Looking Ahead

The Change Management Center of Excellence has proven its value to the firm, and they understand the importance of continuing their momentum in building overall change capability. “The future is only going to bring an accelerated pace of change,” says the managing director. “So we plan to continue to build the abilities of our team, plus train more sponsors, people managers and others in Prosci change management principles. We’re very appreciative of our partnership with Prosci. They’re guiding us along the way and helping to advance our team’s journey, while helping us change and move forward as an organization.”