Data is everywhere. How can we use it to drive change effectively?

In this post we aim to inspire you with the idea of using data to baseline, nudge, and react to people’s behaviour and ways of working next time you face the need to achieve organisational change.

Why should organisations modify the way they approach change today?

Obtaining a return on investment requires wide adoption of change, whether it be of systems, processes, or roles. Most business and organisational transformations succeed best when attention is paid primarily to people – what they think and feel about the change being enacted, how they understand it, and what they need to succeed and change their behaviours, ways of working and culture.

Better decision-making on change readiness

Deloitte goes beyond traditional change management by putting data-driven change management at the centre of every business transformation. It helps to create high awareness, understanding, excitement, trust and commitment to the target technology, operating model, behaviour, or culture.

Data is not only for big organisations or large-scale, global and complex business transformations (see the point of view on driving S4/HANA transformations with big data). Smaller change initiatives benefit from the right approach to using data – setting specific and measurable baseline criteria (e.g. number of active users, percentage of successful training completion, reported people readiness for the upcoming change, etc.), leveraging behavioural science, and having a multidimensional view of the initiatives. Data serves as a key tool to hear, understand, and support your people better by capturing, tracking, and predicting organisational behaviour and culture.

Deloitte’s data-driven change management approach enables business and organisational leaders (e.g., change and transformation programme leaders, etc.) to make higher-quality decisions, based on data insights and predictions. We approach this in an agile way, through iterative cycles, to allow flexible adaptation and continuous adjustment of the target behaviour and culture throughout the business transformation.

Each stakeholder requires different types of data. Programme leadership requires a high-level overview of the change readiness status of the people who are affected. Transformation programme managers need more detail on the drivers of readiness. And the people who are being affected by change are looking for clarity on the impacts on their day-to-day ways of working. Change management dashboards and technologies, such as Deloitte’s ChangeScout, can simplify data collection and visualisation for the transformation by generating the required data in the right formats and level of detail.

We have identified a set of data points to plan and implement change management, with actionable insights to direct behaviour and culture using viable nudges. While these are broadly applicable, every context will have its own specific data requirements.

To fit these requirements, data needs and measurement mechanisms should be aligned to the overall transformation programme objectives and plan. Key opportunities should be identified through multidimensional analyses of various data sources, both qualitative and quantitative. Here we walk you through a day in the life example of one person to show how they would experience data-driven change management and benefit from it.

What tool can we use to measure and track real-time data?

While some change management programmes can use manual tools like Excel, PowerBI or Tableau to track and visualise change, Deloitte’s ChangeScout helps measure and understand where impacted people across the organisation are in their individual change journeys. The tool combines different sources of change data to track real-time progress and evaluate change readiness and adoption anytime, anywhere.

ChangeScout is best suited to large-scale transformations with multiple deployments to a large user base. It provides a holistic view, with automated real-time statistics and reporting on how your people are performing daily, before and during deployment. Readiness dashboards assess whether people who are being affected are ready for go-live and, if not, which mitigation actions need to be taken to make them more ready.

3 key recommendations:

• Data-driven change is not about acquiring more data, but using the data you have in strategic ways: it’s about carefully selecting those data points that can meaningfully inform your future steps and allow you to drive change actions at key moments.
• Involve analytics capabilities from day one in your change process: to achieve maximum impact, your data approach needs to be embedded in the overall programme from the beginning: which data you will collect, and how you will collect and use it, and when key decision-making points will require data-driven inputs.
• Don’t be afraid to iterate and change: Everyone responds to change differently and what might have worked previously for one stakeholder group might not be right for another. Do not be afraid to fine tune your change initiatives based on the data you are receiving. That is precisely what data is for: to provide you with objective information and confidence to drive change management.

For more information on Deloitte’s data-driven approach to change management or how it could help you drive results in your transformation context, please reach out.

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