KPIs and Success Factors for Adoption & Change Management Projects

In Adoption & Change Management (ACM) projects related to digital transformation and/or organizational change, there are some important things to consider ensuring the success of the change initiative. First and foremost, it is important to be aware of what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are required and how they relate to the success factors of the specific project. Without this knowledge, it will be difficult to make decisions that will lead to the successful implementation and effective use of business applications such as Microsoft 365.

Any successful adoption & change management project must consider both quantitative and qualitative aspects. The former deals with numbers and metrics, while the latter focuses on the user experience. Incorporating both perspectives in change projects helps to measure performance across the following three categories:

• Organizational Performance – Did the initiative deliver what was expected?
• Individual Performance – How effectively did impacted individuals adopt and use the change?
• Change Management Performance – How effective were the conducted change management activities?

Our previous experiences show that if organizations don’t establish the right measurements in advance, implementing and sustaining the change can be challenging. On the other side, thinking trough specific KPIs for each category enables organizations to define their baseline and embed it in their ACM plan for driving sustainable change. In this article, we will discuss some of the tools and KPIs that we use with customers in connection to Microsoft 365 to monitor and analyze the performance of ACM projects as visualized in Figure 1:

Measuring organizational performance

The Microsoft 365 platform is vast and changes rapidly, but business needs are common and slower. When establishing a baseline, organizations should take a holistic view of their level of maturity with the technology to gain an understanding of their current vs desired state. Therefore, we recommend our customers to start with a maturity assessment that concentrates on a set of business competencies, that resonate with Microsoft 365 yet underpin real business activities. Some of the most relevant business competencies are depicted in Figure 2: 

The maturity assessment is conducted in the form of an interview or a survey of key stakeholders from the organization. The collected feedback allows organizations to figure out where they are in any function or department and what ‘better’ entails. As such, it is one of the main qualitative KPIs to be used at the beginning of an ACM project can help organizations in these important ways:

• Understand and compare options for solving business problems
• Focus time, energy, and resources on the right priorities
• Identify the budget and resources needed to move ahead

 

Tracking individual performance

There are both qualitative and quantitative tools and methods within Microsoft 365 that enable organizations to track individual performance in a GDPR compliant way. Our experience shows that for best results, organizations should use a combination of end user surveys and usage analytics tools when defining and monitoring their adoption and change management targets. In table Table 1 provides a summary of the success criteria used by most organizations:

As depicted in the table, the tracking of these KPIs needs to be repeated at specific points in the ACM project lifecycle. The resulting information is used to decide if adaptive or corrective actions are required.

 

Measuring change management performance

The final category that is important to be measured during an ACM project is the performance of the overall change management initiative. In this respect, SoftwareOne uses the de-facto-industry standard approach from PROSCI in combination with SoftwareOne’s proven ACM Matrix. A key element for the success of this approach is the so-called ADKAR methodology which stands for Awareness, Deisre, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the used ACM activities, end user surveys will be used at different points of the project as depicted in Figure 3:

After collecting feedback on change management activities, finding the root cause for employee resistance is the first step to identifying corrective action. The stages of the ADKAR model provide a high-level framework for categorizing feedback from employees and understanding the source of resistance. We recommend this framework because it is oriented toward the employee, and therefore the resulting corrective action is targeted at the transition stages for employees.

Now you should have a better idea of some of the KPIs and tools that companies can use to measure the success of their ACM projects and initiatives. Would you like to learn more about how to set up your own KPIs and success factors for your upcoming project? Then get in touch with us for more information.