Good technology rollouts really count. Many people I have worked with over the past few years often face the tough experience of having to make decisions around new technology that will fundamentally affect business results. In the past 18 months, I have noticed many clients have been pushed into situations where things must be upgraded urgently (due often to all the mergers).

Often this technology is something like a new retail platform, a best-of-class CRM or a set of core capabilities the business has never had. At times, these needs arise from a system that was put into the business 20 years ago and since then the IT team have been building bolt-on solutions. Eventually it reaches the point where there are so many workarounds for the users that everyone just considers the system a massive handbrake. Organisational change has to occur, as the focus for increased performance is greater than ever.

A good example of this kind of new technology is Oracle's Seibel CRM product. AFG Group, one of Australia's largest mortgage brokers, has used this product with great success. They use it to source loan products, lodge applications, generate leads & manage clients, all from a single point of entry. Check out the video below – at 3 mins 9 secs, it shows how they are now using this technology to manage brokers and other overseas business development activities. This project has enabled AFG to stay right ahead of the game in an extremely tough financial market.

The general solution is to spend up to hundreds of millions of dollars on new technology to consolidate workflows, reduce time taken to get information, or find the right information etc.

What often actually happens though is this:

• The project goes way over time and budget and the change management process fails
• Only specific users get the new technology right and they were the high performers anyway
• The strategic planning done prior to implementation was nowhere near robust enough & so major gaps appear with the implementation & rollout to users
• The final product offers only 60% of the capability promised and the system workarounds continue

If these were the only blocks faced after implementation, funnily enough the situation would actually not be too much worse. The problem is that this is only the start. What then seems to happen is that while the implementation occurs, sales and/or service levels drop significantly and sales managers start to get punished for their lack of results.

Many users get disillusioned and they start to either leave or look seriously for jobs in competing businesses in the same vertical. This causes increases in staff turnover and a need to then recruit more people at a time when training and reducing the time to competency for new team members is not the highest priority. Finishing the implementation and knowing the systems core capabilities actually collect “all” of the data accurately and can be used to get results is the priority.

So what’s the answer? Consider the following:

• Who is on the rollout project team and why are they there?
• Who is missing that should be there? E.g. possible managers of users who know what functions have to keep on going not matter what
• Have you looked at who your absolute best talent is and how they can add value to the project?
• What kind of mini pilots have you or are you intending to run prior to getting serious about the rollout?
• If you have gathered groups of high performers to do the testing, have you then ensured these people are trained in knowledge-transfer and work-place training techniques to get your population back to its core results capability ASAP? How is this behaviour change actually going to occur on the ground?
• What kind of knowledge-capture processes do you have around the more “tacit” or informal smarts the high performers have? How do these apply in the “New” technology platform or world? How are these to be transferred? How is your talent management process taking this into account?

Making sure you have covered off the above at the very least will enable you to keep leveraging your best people to transfer their results across populations. Sometimes you may need to bring in technology providers you have never thought of prior to the project. In fact, this might not become apparent in any of the project design phases and might only be discovered during implementation.

As yet, technology in business has hardly been used to harness the knowledge held by talented high-performing individuals. Why not? Well, it's funny that you shoud ask. We are now great at storing data – check on any company you like and you’ll find shared hard drives with data trees up to your eyebrows. But in most cases if you ask the users where they access essential information on the best people's progress and what they have learned in the last week, they’ll seldom tell you “Oh that’s right here." It just does not seem to happen. This kind of organisational change, although being used in some cases, is still some way off.

What would you need to do in order to be able to do it better?

1. Firstly, you’d need to have a system where you could design a database of internal smarts, probably categorised by area, and which uses a kind of hierarchy to capture information design.
2. Then you’d need to define the “Key” areas and who knows the most about them – a talent identification and management process. In other words, you would want to have a series of “Internal Experts”.
   
3. You’d need some way of downloading in each area a series of what really matters e.g. in a sales environment, it might be sales meetings, follow-up process, product knowledge, add-on sales, major client relationship building etc.
4. As the database was built upon, almost certainly you would want to have some kind of tags or “Meta tags” where the information in each file has a meaningful link to a user searching for it.
   
5. Finally, you’d need to understand how, why and when people would access these smarts.

Test small first, and test as you design, as part of the organisational change process. Find out what works and do more of that! Most often, the IT people get carried away with technology that no one else cares about or knows how to use, so the money is wasted.

The ability to understand and box the key distinctions of your best people in key areas enables you to create results in your business much faster than other organisations in your industry. Whether you have a population of 10, 50, 500 or 15,000, the ability to roadmap what your best people do that differs from what the others do can create a massive competitive advantage.

Listen to Tom Young (BP's Global Knowledge Management Team) from Knoco talk about the value of understanding the key smarts of some of your most talented people when they are on their way out of an organisation. If you start this process as a part of your talent management program, the savings can quickly add into the millions of dollars.

NOTE: The sound at the start of this video is slightly poor, but it gets better.

Key Areas

Isolate key areas and then break these down into Heuristics, the hands-on approaches that your best people use to get results. These approaches tend most often not to be in procedures yet, as talented people generally do things for which procedures have not yet been invented. Procedures tend to come much later down the track after everyone else finds out about the strategies and then starts to use them. Eventually someone says, "Hey, we should add this to the procedure manual."

Heuristics on Key Areas

• Take those key areas and ask yourself what heuristics were needed in order for this to work with that particular person?
• What was the outcome required?
• Where could things fall down?

Stories & History of Key Incidents That Caused Big Results 

Look at actual stories or case studies. What happened in those key areas in the past where great things have happened? How was this used to get as good or better results in later instances? Also what was needed in order to get much better results?

By mapping these kinds of things around your highest performers, you build accurate models of what your most talented people do to get results.

I have friends you can’t meet for morning tea for 8 weeks because they are booked out. Others, you can consistently book a catch-up with so long as you give them 7 days notice and that’s that, every time. Then there are people who will be available tomorrow at 3pm or Friday at 9am and any further out than that and you can forget it!

TIME – Why is that the case?

Is it true that the person booked up for 8 weeks is more important, successful or has more happening in their lives than those you could get an appointment with tomorrow?

INTERESTINGLY IN OUR EXPERIENCE, NO!

Funnily enough, some of the leaders of the biggest organisations in the country operate very much in the now. If it weren't for some very smart assistants, things would look very different. How might this information influence you and your team’s ability to get results?

Is everybody different around time? What kinds of people are similar and why? We will deal with only one part of this major body of work that up until now been badly under-researched.

How do I know? Well, all the time I see organisations facing people issues where certain portions of populations are extremely reactive and others are the opposite, far too slow to react. Where do you sit? How about your best people when you are "Managing Your Talent"? Are they reactive or more strategic? What's needed more in your environment?

“Your interpretation of time is not a right or a wrong one. However, if you are too extreme either way with regard to your specific work context and what’s required, you can really lose out.”

What should you do to ensure your thinking around time fits with your business role? Here are three suggestions to consider with regard to the people in your workplace.

1)     In a fast-paced sales or back office production environment, you probably want to be able to move quickly and hence timeframes are almost certain to be shorter.

2)     In a strategic planning or IT implementation environment, it might pay to have a medium-term time perspective. However, watch out! Get this to be more a long-term perspective and that $500 million dollar IT rollout can easily blow into costing twice as much.

3)     In Strategy & Planning roles in major organisations, the people involved are better to have a really good understanding of time in the long term. But they still need to be able to partner with the people on the floor conducting the rollout.

So what if you’ve got people in completely the wrong place?

What if you have people (even managers) on the floor who think learning a set of specific behaviours will take 3 months when your best manager considers it can easily be learnt in 24 hours? A problem in many IT, HR and L&D departments is that when major rollouts occur, the third parties always talk about giving things some time... until the budget's blown and the business is locked into making even tougher decisions!