If you’re about to implement a new system at your business, it’s essential that the process goes smoothly. Any failure could mean significant financial losses, jobs on the line or even putting the business itself in jeopardy.
However, we know you’ll have carefully considered your options, made a sizeable financial investment, and selected the best tech for the job, so what could go wrong? Unfortunately, the answer to that is: people. People are resistant to change, they’re busy with their normal jobs and often simply don’t want the hassle.
With potentially catastrophic consequences if the project fails, we’re here to guide you in overcoming this ‘people barrier’ to help make sure it doesn’t. Let’s start with our three-step plan, giving you the best chance of tech project success…
1. Define your goals
What do you want to achieve? Is it to introduce new technology that will boost productivity but requires abandoning ‘old ways’? Is it a revolutionary system that the whole company will need to adopt? Whatever you wish to achieve, we’re sure you’re in the best position to assess your business needs and select the right product for the task. Having clear goals at the outset is your first step to success. It’s the next part that’s really daunting and where everything can fall apart…
2. Recognise the ‘people barrier’
Once you know what you want to achieve, you need to get the whole business on board. We don’t just mean passing your plans by directors; we mean persuading every member of staff who’s affected by the change to be confident and positive about adopting the new tech.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. In fact, in a recent survey over 90% of businesses listed ‘people related factors’ as their main reasons for technology implementation failure. As humans, we’re all resistant to change whether it’s small-scale stuff like changing your toothpaste brand or something on a bigger scale, like swapping a familiar system at work for something totally new and initially confusing. It’s not surprising that ‘people’ are a real barrier for companies trying to implement new tech.
Once you recognise and accept that you need to overcome the ‘people barrier’, you can move to the next step and multiply your chances of success.
3. Call in the experts
We’re sure you’re amazing at your job, but your training is unlikely to have included energising a whole business to become engaged and excited about adopting big, technological changes! This, however, is crucial to success… and is our area of expertise.
At Curium, we help businesses like yours to implement tech projects by engaging with staff, training them, alleviating fears, and boosting enthusiasm. 84% of businesses listed ‘resistance to change’ in their top five reasons for failure. We tackle this issue head on to help staff at all levels adopt your carefully selected tech into their normal working lives.
This is the final step towards project success: recognising the need for help and making use of what’s available to you. In this case… it’s us. Having spent all that time, effort and money on your project, it’s definitely worth investing a fraction of the budget on giving it the best chance of success at the final hurdle. After all, the alternative could spell disaster for your business.
Find out more
No matter how perfect or revolutionary your selected tech may be, if people are not part of the transitional journey, then you’re setting your project up for failure. We recently carried out a survey of businesses to understand their top ‘pain points’ when implementing new systems. Read the report and see how much of it sounds familiar… and be forewarned of the kinds of challenges you should try to avoid!
If you’d like to discuss how Curium can help you and your business as you embark on your tech project, please get in touch here or email RobMcCracken@curiumsolutions.com, our Head of Change, for more information.
