IN THE FIELD: A Model for Organizational Change Management

Using analytics to drive risk culture upgrades

By: Kevin Cunningham

Digital transformation is changing customer experiences, business models, and operations across most industries.

In steel construction, contractors can analyze digital data from past accidents to help build a culture that continuously improves safety. That kind of safety culture prevents accidents, saves lives, and reduces the likelihood of lawsuits.

Establishing an effective process for continuous safety improvement requires contractors to transform compliance-based mindsets to a holistic view of safety culture. Companies can use advanced tools like risk analytics to look at the causes of past incidents in order to reduce or eliminate them in future. In a true safety culture, legal compliance is a natural outcome instead of the primary driver.

Cranes are a critical tool in steel erection. To apply risk analytics to the use of cranes, Crane Risk Logic’s Information Exchange captures crane accident and non-accident data, forming the foundation for risk analytics wherever cranes are used, but implementation requires a focus on organizational change.

Kevin Cunningham is President and CEO of Crane Risk Logic, which provides science-based crane risk improvement services. SEAA is a trade group member of the Federation for Crane Risk Improvement, designed to facilitate information exchange.

People, Process and Technology

Effective safety sits at the intersection of your people and process. Risk analytics can tell an erector which changes in behaviors and processes will do the most to reduce its risk of accidents.

Making those changes requires an erector to break away from the status quo and mentality of “this is how we have always done things.” But merely developing and deploying automated software won’t do the job. Your people are key to safety innovation. The more data they put into the system, the more information the program can analyze in order to recommend, in real time, ways to reduce your risks.

Risk analytics models can help organizations use data, experiment, and innovate much faster than they could before since the data tells which changes will do the most good. As a result, continuous safety improvement becomes a part of daily operations.

A Model for Change Management

There are four phases in organizational change management.

Phase 1: Initial excitement. In the early phase, people are excited and open minded about the benefits the transformation will bring the company. As more details emerge, they start asking how the initiative will impact their roles. They become more informed and more inquisitive. They start to realize the potential consequences on their day-to-day duties and responsibilities.

Phase 2: Realization of effort and complexity. This is the most critical time in adopting the new culture. If questions go unanswered, employees build their own narratives, which are almost always ill-informed. Fear and panic can thwart motivation. Staff may handicap themselves or their teams with unrealistic goals and poorly thoughtout plans. They may seek delay tactics, such as extensive analysis, over-engineering, or unneeded complexity.

Phase 3: Integration. Eventually, the chaos of realization passes. Employees and other stakeholders discover how culture transformation through real-life, real-time analytics affects them and their safety. Your people start to have a vested interest in positive risk-culture outcomes, and try to align to the company’s new way of thinking.

Phase 4: New confidence and continuous improvement. Finally, your workforce accepts continuous improvement through ongoing risk analysis as a normal process of your business.

When the culture change is well assimilated, your workers engage deeply with risk analytics. Their performance aligns fully with continuous risk-improvement practices. Team members feel a sense of accomplishment and are open and honest about what is at stake. Workforce leaders directly involved in the project start to actively recruit new believers. Their implementation crawl evolves into more of a fast walk or slow jog, as culture transformation becomes contagious throughout your organization.

Next are lessons on digital change management from James Davidson of CMS WIRE, a business strategist for the 75 Summit Enterprise. According to Davidson, there are five stages of digital change management.

Prepare. To garner the necessary support, leaders are often laser-focused in this phase on business intelligence and securing funding and resources against their grand plan. What is frequently missed is laying the right foundation for driving change from the start. The process should include:

• Developing a digital transformation charter that articulates your business goals and the strategies to achieve these goals.

• Identifying executive stakeholders and functional change agents. They will be key to removing roadblocks and creating elements, and documenting your execution roadmap. These are all key inputs to your change plan.

Additional change management activities should include:

• Holding regular steering meetings with your COE stakeholders, impacted functional leaders and change agents to refine your vision and plan.

• Conducting an organizational readiness assessment that covers team structure and sponsorship, governance, adoption, measurement and communication.

Your goal is to identify key tactics that will drive your intended change by your target audiences and in what order (pre-launch, at launch, post-launch) they will be most impactful.

Design. This is the phase in which the digital transformation blueprint is finalized. Wireframes, interactive prototypes, proof of concepts, high fidelity designs, solution architecture charts, integration mapping, and data modeling help bring the vision to life for a broader set of stakeholders. From a change perspective, this phase is when the inputs from the previous phases are formed into a plan that will inform your Build phase.

Your change goal is to activate your change workstreams to create their tactical work plans and schedules.

Build and Verify. While highly differentiated from a development perspective, the Build and Verify stages can be grouped when considering impactful change management approaches.

Build and Verify is when your digital transformation becomes real as developers execute against your product backlog. This is also where change management fortitude begins to flounder.

Progress is easy to measure in terms of the development of working code, so the more intangible elements are often de-prioritized. Typically, in digital transformations destined for failure, leaders entering the Verify phase begin to organize a change management workstream.

Successful organizations, on the other hand, merge their project management tools, combining requirements and user stories with the previously defined change management plans and tasks. Having one project management environment inclusive of requirements and business tasks forces collaboration and discussion between change leads, project managers, and developers. Change management activities should be included in the same planning sessions, reviews, and daily stand-ups as development items.

Launch phase is the most critical moment for any change management team. It’s time to drive the change and adoption of the digital tool. If change management has been properly integrated into the digital transformation initiative, your change team should have already completed most of the work. All of the Pre-Launch activities are completed, key stakeholders are trained, business processes have been created or adapted, and measurement plans are in place and awaiting user data. Your goal in this phase is setting up for sustaining change.

There is a vast amount of information available on crane risk analytics. Applying that to “art of the possible” thinking at your company may first require some inner reflecting on your safety culture. However, by combining proven stages of effective change management with digital transformation phases via risk analytics safety in crane and steel erector trades can be materially improved.