SAP ORGANIZATIONAL

CHANGE MANAGEMENT
TOOLKIT
Strategic Organizational Alignment and
Project-Level Change Management
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CONTENTS
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
The Case for Organizational Change Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
Predictable SAP Business Integration Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
The Goal of Organizational Change Management? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6
What Successful Organizational Change Looks Like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Building Your Team to Match Your Needs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
The Prime Directive: Act with the End in Mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
Moving Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

2. Fundamentals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Helping Your Organization Understand the Business Case . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Why People Resist Change (And How to Overcome Resistance) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Levers for Change: Moving Your Organization to Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
The ASAP Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
– Phase 1: Project Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
– Phase 2: Business Blueprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
– Phase 3: Realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
– Phase 4: Final Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
– Phase 5: Go-Live and Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
– Phase 6: Continuous Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
Levers for Change and the ASAP Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
– Leadership and Sponsorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
– Skills and Competencies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .16
– Organization Design and Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
– Communications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .19
– Governance and Compliance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
– Performance Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
– Incentives and Rewards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23
– Hiring and Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
– Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25

3. Organizational Change Management and the ASAP Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26

Phase 1: Project Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
– OCM Practice: Develop and Communicate a Clear Business Case for Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
– OCM Practice: Conduct a Business Risk Assessment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
– OCM Practice: Develop and Execute a Leadership Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28

3
– OCM Practice: Establish a Steering Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
– OCM Practice: Build and Execute a Project Governance Procedure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
– OCM Practice: Develop a Change Communications Strategy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Phase 2: Business Blueprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
– OCM Practice: Devise and Execute a Tactical Communications Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
– OCM Practice: Build a Stakeholder Realization Campaign Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
– OCM Practice: Create a Work-Impact Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
Phase 3: Realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
– OCM Practice: Organizational Design and Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
– OCM Practice: Complete Role Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
Phase 4: Final Prep . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
– OCM Practice: OCM Practice: Business Readiness Planning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
– OCM Practice: Do We Have the Right People? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37
– OCM Practice: Incentives and Rewards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Phase 5: Go-Live and Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
OCM Practice: Celebrate Go-Live! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Phase 6: Continuous Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
– OCM Practice: How Are They Doing? The Performance Management Lever . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
– OCM Practice: Reinforcing Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
– OCM Practice: Refining Organization Design and Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
– OCM Practice: Hiring and Selection During Continuous Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
– OCM Practice: Communications During Continuous Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41

Appendix: Links to OCM Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

– Phase 1: Project Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
– Phase 2: Business Blueprint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
– Phase 3: Realization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
– Phase 4: Final Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
– Phases 5 and 6: Go-Live, Support, and Continuous Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42

4
1. Introduction
Change. Let it run uncontrolled, and it’s destructive and costly.
Harness it well and it’s the fuel of success. How change affects
your company is determined by the way you manage it.
The SAP® Education organization has designed this SAP Organiza-
tional Change Management (OCM)Toolkit to help your business carry
out your change management project. It provides concepts, sug-
gested processes, and real-life tools for conducting organizational
change within your business or agency. It’s designed to enable
your OCM team to plan and execute a successful effort and intro-
duce your SAP solution with a minimum of disruption.
This chapter introduces the idea of organizational change
management, makes a case for its importance for your project,
and explains our approach to managing change.
Studies of systems implementations consistently show that
human performance, not technology, is the leading cause of fail-
ure to achieve expected results from a system implementation. In
fact, a recent worldwide SAP survey of 186 implementations found
that two of the leading barriers to successful implementation
were “inadequate skills and training” and “organizational resist-
ance.”
Experience has shown us that the success of any SAP implementa-
tion depends on how the project team addresses three critical ele-
ments of project readiness: people, processes, and technology.
These three elements don’t operate in a vacuum. In fact, they’re
intimately related, and success in any one of them depends on
what you do with the other two. As you go through the various
tasks and processes in this volume, you’ll find that most of them
are interrelated. Few, if any, elements in an OCM project exist in-
dependently, or even in an orderly timeline.

The Case for Organizational Change Management

The effectiveness and success of any organization’s strategic pro-
gram depends in large part on how that organization manages
human, technological, and organizational change. Implementing
world-class information technology alone will not achieve the de-
sired business results if the people affected aren’t aware of how
changes to business processes, roles, and responsibilities will affect
them – nor will it succeed if they are not ready, willing, and able
to use new skills and tools.

This is not an “SAP only” phenomenon. Indeed, change manage-

ment is a long-standing human need. In 185 B.C., the Roman poet
Terrance wrote, “There is nothing so easy but that it becomes dif-
ficult when you do it with reluctance.”

5

ELEMENTS OF PROJECT READINESS
Get the
system
ready
Get the Get the
processes people
ready ready
Figure 1: Project Preparation
Predictable Business Integration Challenges
During a typical implementation, an SAP project team appropri-
ately focuses on the SAP technology and process aspects of
improving the business. However, the human dimension of the
implementation needs every bit as much attention as the software
configuration. We cannot underestimate the need for addressing
the human dimension in a business change, both to ensure a suc-
cessful launch and to accelerate the business benefits expected
from the implementation. To ensure minimal disruption and de-
liver a rapid return of value, SAP customers should execute a
change management plan involving demonstrated commitment
by leadership, sound governance, effective change
communications, and efficient training.
Business Integration Considerations
• The best-designed improvement strategies, from technol-
ogy enhancements to mergers and acquisitions to shared-
services arrangements, do not realize benefits expected
unless people across the business are engaged, informed,
and prepared to succeed.
• The best business processes are ineffective if people in the
organization do not understand and follow them.
• The best technology in the world is inadequate if people
in the organization do not use it.
6
It’s also important to remember that change management is not a
“one and done” operation. While you may reach the end of your
change management program for a specific implementation or
upgrade, you’re likely to carry out ongoing OCM procedures as
long as you use your SAP solution. Business is never static, so the
need to manage change doesn’t go away.
This toolkit is organized to assist you over the long term. If you
have not done any organizational change management, you may
wish to start at the beginning. However, if you have already begun
some change activities, or if you are familiar with OCM, jump
ahead to any section you think might be helpful.
The Goal of Organizational Change Management
Your OCM effort has a very simple goal: to make sure personnel
challenges don’t get in the way of meeting your SAP implementa-
tion business goals. Your OCM effort exists to create and execute
the strategy for a minimally disruptive business transition. Its
charge is to explain changes to job roles and tasks, to build accept-
ance of the new solution, to redefine departmental boundaries
where necessary, and even to facilitate required changes to organi-
zational structures and teams. The bottom line: your OCM proj-
ect works to speed adoption of your SAP solution and accelerate
its return of value.
Aspects of Organizational Change
There are two fundamental aspects of organizational change:
• Strategic organizational alignment
• Project-level change management
Strategic organizational alignment focuses on enabling a sys-
temic shift in organizational behavior and culture. It concentrates
on such intangibles as leadership, alignment, commitment, direc-
tion, expectations, and messaging. Its purpose is to make sure
everyone in the organization is on the same page and is going in
the same direction. Without strategic organizational alignment,
the likelihood of achieving your desired changes and business re-
sults will be seriously diminished.
As an internal person tasked with creating systemic changes, you
face a big challenge in dealing with internal culture, politics, and
traditions. Change in these areas can be difficult, as employees or
groups fight to hold on to the familiar ways of doing things. This
toolkit will help you by recommending techniques to motivate
even the most resistant members of your organization.
Project-level change management identifies the specific tasks by
department, role, and person necessary for your organization to
execute your new processes successfully. Because neither can be
successful without the other, you must include both strategic or-
ganizational alignment and project-level change management in
your OCM efforts. Project-level change management represents
the tactical portion of your OCM effort, and a typical mistake is to
focus solely on these tactical activities. However, simply complet-
ing the checklist of project-level change management tasks does
not mean your organization is aligned with its vision.
The table on the following page summarizes the characteristics of
these two aspects of organizational change.
7
Strategic and Project-Level Change Management at a Glance
Objective Long-term transformation
Duration Enterprise focus – business transformation
(years)
Application When a systemic shift in business behavior and
culture change is required to achieve organiza-
tional awareness, understanding, commitment,
and action
Components Focused on ongoing activities to support busi-
ness strategy and long-term objectives:
• Executives lead drive to achieve a business suc-
cess story and provide role models for how to
succeed in the new setting.
• Managers are well informed and actively work
to establish new business practices within their
teams.
• Business design is integrated at the enterprise
level, enabling delivery of a consistent operat-
ing platform for "good" growth.
• Employee ability to succeed in the new envi-
ronment is supported by a collection of inte-
grated people, processes, management prac-
tices, performance systems, and reward
strategies.
• Staff demonstrates new work behaviors, which
are supported by leadership, to realize a new
set of operating values.
• Work norms necessary to realize maximum
benefit are demonstrated by people at all levels
of the business.
Outputs/ • Executive communications
focus • Governance/leadership strategy
• Sponsorship alignment plan
• Incentives and rewards
• Staffing and resource strategy
8
Project launch success
Tactical focus – ERP implementation
(months)
When designed to enhance people's ability to
move from a current way of thinking and
conducting work to a new way of applying
tools, systems, and process to increase flexibili-
ty, quality, productivity, and innovation and
reduce cost
Focused on activities to support successful
implementation of project objectives that ful-
fill the business requirements and business
case:
• Project has built a guiding coalition of lead-
ers who support deployment and are
individually and collectively accountable to
drive specific project goals.
• Key executives are well prepared to lead
change, supported by individual plans, activ-
ities, and a robust tool set.
• People are in the right jobs with the right
skills and supported by preparations and
tools that set them up for success.
• A systematic transition strategy minimizes
business disruption and shortens time to
achieve full project benefits.
• Every employee is prepared to succeed on
day one of launch.
• People understand new work requirements,
which their leadership supports to realize
full benefits expected.
• Communication actions
• Training activities
• Organization structure analysis
• Governance (steering committee process)
• Local site-readiness preparations
Typical OCM Challenges
Business change driven by an implementation of SAP software can
be comprehensive; if you’re going to manage the risk it involves,
you need to understand the challenges it can bring. The good
news is that you can anticipate many of the typical transition
issues that may arise, such as:
• Your employees may see their leaders as out of touch with the
implementation program and not focused on program impera-
tives.
• Your organization’s business units may have limited participa-
tion during program design and cutover preparations and may
resist them.
• Your program may not be able to identify or resolve implemen-
tation issues quickly or completely.
• The business may feel unclear regarding new work roles and re-
sponsibilities the program creates.
• Your workforce may be unprepared and ill equipped to succeed
in the new work setting.
Anticipating and addressing these challenges within the SAP im-
plementation effort is essential to fostering a smooth, successful
business transition. Recognizing which of these symptoms has the
potential to affect your project’s success and addressing their un-
derlying causes is critical, both to “go-live” success in the short
term and the stability of your new SAP solution in the long run.
Common Enterprise Software Implementation
Requirements
Most enterprise software implementations require you to do the
following:
• Deploy new business processes to diverse business units consis-
tently and efficiently.
• Prepare each significant business segment for transition and
manage activities in a way that both accelerates acceptance and
minimizes local work-arounds and resistance.
• Make the best use of business resources, particularly end-user
tools and new manager roles and activities, in preparing the
workforce for changes to operations systems and processes.
• Manage resistance from any business managers who are vested
in continuing existing work practices and process.
• Solicit the right mix of stakeholder participation and feedback
during the project.
• Secure the right number and type of extended team resources
to involve in the operations readiness teams and in business
preparation for go-live.
• Position the implementation project to complement other criti-
cal business programs.
• Establish a committed steering committee that takes an active
role in supporting the new SAP solution, helps remove
obstacles, and provides resources where critical to maintain the
implementation schedule.
• Help staff transition from their current roles to new SAP project
roles and work practices in a way that accelerates the transition
and minimizes business disruption.
In Chapter 3 of the SAP OCM Toolkit you’ll find tools and strate-
gies for addressing typical OCM challenges and meeting the
requirements of your implementation.
What Successful Organizational Change Looks Like
A successful organizational change combines a collection of com-
plementary activities working together to ensure a smooth shift in
critical items, such as (but not limited to):
• Organizational work practices
• Corporate policies
• Decision-making procedures
• Operating values and behavior
As a result of your change management activities, the workforce
understands and accepts the reasons for change and acts together
to achieve a common set of performance improvement goals. A
successful organizational change campaign enables business teams
to use their new SAP solution or upgrade to work smarter and
faster and create more valuable, more accurate, and more cost-
efficient results.
9

Three Common Organizational Outcomes
The most successful SAP implementations achieve three
common organizational outcomes:
• The business is mobilized to make the change.
The OCM effort has engaged everyone in the
organization with a stake in attaining a high-performance
and competitive advantage for the business.
• The business is prepared to perform in the new set-
ting. The OCM effort has provided employees the infor-
mation and tools they need to embrace change and inte-
grate it into everyday work practice. In addition, OCM is
integrated with employee training and support.
• All transitions are managed so the affected people
know where the program is and what’s next.
The OCM effort gives everyone in the organization a logi-
cal path for moving from the old ways to the new ones.
The core project team, the business process owners, the
critical third parties – everyone involved knows how to
transition from current operational procedures and
adopt the new SAP technology.
We will drill down into each of these three organizational
outcomes a bit more in Chapter 3.
Building Your Team to Match Your Needs
As you build your OCM initiative team, keep the objectives of
your project clearly in sight and create a team to meet them. The
size of your team and the roles of individuals will vary depending
on a number of variables. For example:
• Size of the overall project team
• Number of sites involved in the project
• Number of business functions impacted by the change
• Number of end users impacted by the change
10
Large OCM teams may consist of a dozen or more staffers. A small
organization in which the business changes will impact only 50 to
200 end users might ask a single individual to own the total OCM
effort. Indeed, the OCM effort in smaller operations may not have
its own dedicated staff; rather, it might take up a percentage of an-
other team’s time. For example, the project management office
itself might handle it; or it might be spread across the project’s
process teams, each team owning the management of change for
its respective functional organizations and end users.
In all situations, however, and for companies of all sizes, the scope
of an OCM effort is the same:
• Mobilize the business.
• Prepare people to perform.
• Manage everyone’s transition.
Your OCM team should feel free to adapt the concepts and tools
presented in this toolkit to its unique situation and business case.
While the OCM approach we present here is consistently action-
oriented, it’s designed to be flexible. You can adapt the concepts to
the tactics, delivery channels, and audiences most relevant to
your specific situation and transition priorities.
The Prime Directive: Act with the End in Mind
There’s one critical rule of thumb above all others: act with the
end in mind. As discussed earlier, you have successfully managed
your OCM effort if you’ve mobilized the business, prepared people
to perform, and managed everyone’s transition. Following are
high-level activities that will enable you to reach this successful
end state.
Mobilizing the Business
• Build a guiding coalition of leaders who can furnish resources,
drive key messages, remove roadblocks, and help solve problems
that challenge implementation success.
• Promote the SAP program to all your stakeholders – executives,
managers, and end users alike – so everyone understands the
value of the process changes and SAP technology and has confi-
dence that the SAP program can improve operations results. In
addition, stakeholders should recognize how they can
contribute to business integration success.
Preparing People to Perform
• Work with your business teams and operations managers to ful-
ly prepare the staff to be impacted by any new practices. Create
the tools and transition planning needed to help your staff suc-
ceed in the new setting and achieve the productivity gains made
possible by new SAP solutions.
• Work with your project design teams, process owners, and other
subject-matter experts to analyze how process changes will im-
pact their work. In addition, explain to your business staff how
new roles and skill requirements will affect them.
• Provide detailed recommendations for how to manage the tran-
sition for each significant business organization or geographic
site.
Managing Everyone’s Transition
• Develop a clear, consistent business vision and gain “buy-in”
from all levels of the business early on and throughout the de-
ployment. To achieve these goals, you’ll need to work closely
with business sponsors and executives as well as members of the
SAP program steering committees.
• Set up systems to involve stakeholders in key decisions and to
resolve problems or issues related to organizational change. Use
these systems to identify issues that challenge operational suc-
cess, and work with the program teams and business leaders to
address them.
• Use a systematic, proactive organizational change assessment
approach to recognize problems early and apply appropriate re-
sources to resolve obstacles quickly. Continue to apply and ex-
pand these practices as part of your site cutover planning.
Recognizing Change Management as an Art,
Not an Exact Science
The OCM process described in this toolkit draws upon best prac-
tices from hundreds of successful projects. One of the lessons
we’ve learned from these projects is that managing OCM
initiatives is a balancing act that requires flexibility and improvisa-
tion. As we mentioned earlier, the steps in an OCM effort don’t al-
ways follow a linear pattern. Often there is overlap between the
tasks you perform – and team members may be asked to start a
new activity before finishing the previous ones.
For example, at the start of the project your communications
team may engage employees with a set of communications initia-
tives. Before they’ve finished, individuals handling communica-
tion may be pulled away to work on stakeholder alignment activi-
ties. Later, they will revisit communications to ensure that
employees are still engaged.
As a result, it may seem as though there is no end to certain OCM
activities. But in reality, the team is achieving its goals by engaging
and reengaging the workforce at key points in the
implementation project. The art of organizational change man-
agement is balancing these activities to be successful, improvising
when necessary.
Moving Forward
In the next chapter, we’ll examine some change management fun-
damentals. Then in Chapter 3, we’ll discuss best practices for
OCM and introduce a series of tools and accelerators you can use
to develop your own change management project.
11
2. Fundamentals
The major objective of your OCM effort is to get your end users to
accept and become competent with your new SAP solution as
quickly as possible. The result will be a more rapid realization of
value from your SAP solution. In this chapter, we’ll describe the
fundamental tasks your OCM effort must accomplish to gain user
acceptance and begin realizing the benefits of your SAP initiative.
Helping Your Organization Understand the Business
Case
To ensure the overall success of your SAP project, everyone in your
organization must understand the business case driving it. It’s the
job of your OCM effort to make sure that happens. A successfully
executed organizational change management plan creates a con-
text that makes business drivers meaningful for employees.
The “change adoption curve” (Figure 2) reinforces this point.
The first two milestones on the road to organizational adoption
are awareness and understanding. Once you achieve these, it is
possible to gain acceptance, individual adoption, and eventually
full organizational adoption.
Figure 2: The Change Adoption Curve1
1
Adapted from Remy S. Leeuwin, Organizational Change with input from Guy
Couillard, OTA
12
Why People Resist Change (And How to Overcome
Resistance)
Change management theory tells us there are four reasons why
people resist change:
• They didn’t know about the change.
• They weren’t able to do whatever the change required.
• They felt they weren’t included or involved in the change.
• They didn’t see the change as a priority.
As Figure 2 shows, appropriately timed OCM activities can accel-
erate and encourage the acceptance of change. At a high level,
here’s how your OCM effort can overcome resistance:
• For people who “don’t know,” your OCM effort should provide
information and communication.
• For people who feel unable, your OCM effort should integrate
with your training processes to ensure relevant training is pro-
vided.
• For people who don’t feel included, your OCM effort should
provide a sense of shared ownership.
• For people who don’t see the change as a priority, your OCM ef-
fort should make sure your leaders are exercising active and visi-
ble advocacy.
Our change management approach provides the techniques tools
needed to overcome resistance and enable individuals and the or-
ganization to adopt change.
Levers for Change: Moving Your Organization to
Change
Earlier in this toolkit we quoted the Roman poet Terrance. Let’s
return to the classics for a moment and remember the opinion of
Archimedes: “Give me a fulcrum on which to rest,” he is reported
to have said, “and I will move the earth.”
A successful OCM strategy gives you the levers to do a little earth
moving. Within and across the four phases of our OCM approach,
we make extensive use of critical levers for change – mechanisms development and when you’re going to apply them. Chapter 3 ex-
that can work within your organization to define, describe, or in- plains how you can do this by integrating the levers into the ASAP
fluence the way it behaves. If you properly apply a given lever methodology.
within a given phase, you have a powerful tool for influencing
positive change. The SAP approach to OCM addresses these eight
levers for change: The ASAP Methodology
• Leadership and sponsorship develops a culture of change As an SAP customer, you’re likely familiar with the ASAP
leadership that aims to build commitment through accounta- methodology, a proven, repeatable, and successful approach to
bility, role clarity, and executive development. implementing or upgrading an SAP solution. Based on best prac-
• Governance and compliance assigns roles and tices culled from hundreds of projects, ASAP has demonstrated its
responsibilities, including decision-making responsibility, and worth for customer projects of all sizes.
creates a culture of compliance based on measurement and
consequences.
• Skills and competencies incorporate competency assessment
and skill development for all employees. This lever incorporates
learning, training, and succession planning into all OCM initia-
tives.
• Performance management establishes and measures individ-
ual and group performance, ensuring alignment with
Figure 3: ASAP Implementation Road Map
enterprise strategies, goals, and objectives.
• Organizational design and structure aligns business and
Let’s take a moment to examine the methodology itself. As you’re
process metrics with process roles and management structures.
probably aware, it consists of six phases, usually depicted in the
• Incentives and rewards provide clarity of desired performance
road map shown in Figure 3.
and compensation, bonuses, and promotions consistent with
good performance and client successes.
• Communications enable change through frequent and factual Phase 1: Project Preparation
information flow, and clearly explained impacts, roles and During Phase 1, you’ll be carrying out your planning and prepara-
responsibilities, benefits, and rewards. tion for your SAP project. Your OCM activities will primarily con-
• Hiring and selection provides personnel strategies (such as re- sist of gathering the information you need to create a workable
train or hire; grow organically or acquire) that ensures individu- change management strategy. You’ll identify your stakeholders,
als possess the right skills and competencies at the right time, plan your communications, and establish your OCM project gov-
resulting in program success. ernance structure.

In fact, these levers are at work within your organization right Phase 2: Business Blueprint
now. If you wish to effect change, you’ll need to find a way to use Your objective during the business blueprint phase is to achieve a
them. And you’ll need to decide which of them require additional common vision and understanding of how the company intends
to support its business with SAP. The result will be your business

13
blueprint: a detailed description of how you plan to achieve your
goals. Your OCM activities will focus around making concrete
plans based on the information you gathered doing the project
preparation phase. During this phase you’ll be working collabora-
tively with the people who define your business processes to iden-
tify the roles involved in your SAP implementation and the
impact your project will have on them. Your work here will serve
as input for your organizational design and structure
requirements and will also help identify necessary skills and com-
petencies.
Phase 3: Realization
The realization phase is where you’ll specifically identify the link-
ages between your user population and the business process
requirements defined in your business blueprint. During realiza-
tion you’ll begin carrying out the OCM activities that will take
you through final preparation and go-live. Among other things,
you’ll make sure you have leadership and sponsorship activities
covered on the local level and ensure you’ve mapped actual peo-
ple to all the roles you identified in Phase 2.
Phase 4: Final Preparation
Final preparation is the last step before you go live. In this phase
your organization will complete testing, end-user training, system
management, and all cutover activities to finalize your readiness
to go into production with your SAP solution. During final prepa-
ration you’ll have a number of critical OCM activities, including
last-minute communications to your users and stakeholders.
Phase 5: Go-Live and Support
The go-live phase moves you from a project-oriented, preproduc-
tion environment to a live production operation. But just because
your project is nominally “completed” during Phase 5,
change management activities don’t stop. Phase 5 requires partic-
ular OCM focus on enabling leaders and managers to support
user productivity and performance. During this phase, you’ll car-
ry out such activities as validating the adoption of the new
14
processes and skills you’ve introduced, capturing the lessons
you’ve learned, and supporting ongoing user development and
skill mastery.
Phase 6: Continuous Improvement
During this phase, you’ll carry out such activities as validating the
adoption of the new processes and skills you’ve introduced, cap-
turing the lessons you’ve learned, and supporting ongoing user
development and skill mastery.
Now that we’ve summarized the change levers and the ASAP
phases, let’s take a look at how they integrate with each other. As
you go through the pages that follow, please remember that the
activities we discuss aren’t necessarily linear. You’ll likely find a
great deal of overlap among the activities we recommend. If it
drives you a little crazy, remember that in this line of work, crazy
is normal.
Levers for Change and the ASAP Methodology
Your business project is a dynamic organism. Like the parts of a
living body, your levers for change operate constantly, and each
one keeps going independently of the others. Just as we think and
digest and breathe as we walk, so the various levers operate simul-
taneously throughout your project. There will be times when one
lever is in the foreground, and you’ll need to provide deliverables
or carry out activities. There will be other times when that same
change lever will apparently seem inactive – but it’ll still be there,
quietly digesting lunch.
In the pages that follow, we’ll look at each of these levers as they
pass through the ASAP phases of project preparation, business
blueprint, realization, final preparation, go-live and support, and
continuous improvement. In Chapter 3 we’ll also introduce a se-
ries of OCM practices to help you manage change within each
phase.
Leadership and Sponsorship
When your corporate leaders – from your executives to your line
managers – visibly model the behaviors necessary to encourage
and advocate your new solution, your employees are more likely
to follow suit. In a 2006 survey, members of the Americas’ SAP
Users’ Group (ASUG) cited “executive sponsorship” and “project
leadership” as the top factors influencing an organization’s ability
to receive value from an SAP investment. Just to remind you of
how effective executive endorsement can be, remember that Ian
Fleming’s James Bond novels were only mildly successful until
someone asked President Kennedy what he liked to read.
Every organization has leaders and sponsors you can leverage to
support and encourage your initiative. Their roles may be official
or unofficial, formal or informal, but their influence can be pow-
erful either way. It is essential that leaders continue to lead and
manage through and beyond go-live and develop a strong sense of
ownership of the project outcomes.
During the project preparation phase it’s important to identify
your key leaders and stakeholders. You also need to confirm that
you’ve aligned those stakeholders across your organization so
they’re supporting your project and creating shared ownership of
project results. It will also be critical for your leaders to visibly en-
dorse the business case for change, which we’ll discuss below as
part of the communications lever.
One of the greatest benefits in smaller organizations is that
typically leaders and managers can have more direct
contact with the organization as a result of their smaller
size. Take full advantage of the reach and access available to
your organization; direct contact is the most powerful
method of messaging and leading change. More complex
solutions become necessary when geographic scope or
numbers of employees increases.
During the blueprint phase, you’ll put the stakeholder manage-
ment plan you created during the project preparation phase into
action. Your activities here will help ensure that you engage and
enable leaders and stakeholders at various levels to fulfill their
role in driving change. Your change leaders will generally be the
people who lead your business now; what change management
does is ensure that your employees are doing the right things at
the right time over the course of your implementation. Essential-
ly, organizational change management is “applying discipline to
common sense.”
Your job during realization and final preparation is to ensure that
your leaders, managers, and sponsors clearly communicate the
roles, responsibilities, and changes expected for the people who
work with them. You’ll also further develop your “change
network,” which is your extended change team. These are individ-
uals across the organization who are not tasked with doing change
management full-time, but who are going to be your connections
within the organization for feedback, communication,
requirements, and so forth.
During the realization and final preparation phases, your leaders
and sponsors should proactively display readily visible
involvement. As part of their role in leading change and managing
risk, your leaders will coach the workforce. They will need to
speak proactively with stakeholders, listen to their questions, and
manage risk by understanding and acting on employee concerns
and issues. There are many ways you can accomplish this: round-
tables or “fireside chats,” lunch-and-learn sessions, or any activity
that regularly and directly connects with employees and allows
you to hear their concerns and to build their trust.
Leaders and managers also need to raise issues, work through the
appropriate governance process, and be visible in a supportive
manner for any item related to the project. Each leader will have
an individual change leadership action plan (outlined in Chapter
15
3), which should be confirmed and revisited if necessary to main-
tain the engagement, participation, and visibility of all key leaders.
During the go-live phase you’ll leverage the cross-business proj-
ect ownership you created during the project preparation and
blueprint phases. It’s during go-live where the accountability for
results comes into play. It rests with the leaders and business
stakeholders who took ownership and those business leaders,
stakeholders, and managers who did the coaching. Your leaders
will continue reinforcing the changes and coaching the organiza-
tion for continued adoption until what was new and different be-
comes very familiar and comfortable.
As we mentioned earlier, your continuous improvement activities
will extend beyond your implementation project. By the time you
reach continuous improvement, your organization will be man-
aging user performance on an ongoing basis. Your leaders should
be making sure people are doing what they should, and making
changes and suggestions to tweak and improve your processes. By
this time, “big change” should become a regular way of life. We
aren’t teaching leaders and managers to lead and manage – but
are expecting them to do that.
Skills and Competencies
The skills and competencies lever is critical for a very simple rea-
son: as good as your SAP software is, it won’t deliver its promised
value unless your people have the knowledge and skills to use it.
Consider, for example, an article from CIO Magazine regarding
the real reason for failure of ERP projects. The author states, “In-
creasingly, experts reckon that they've found the smoking gun:
poor training. Not the technical training of the core team of peo-
ple who are installing the software, but the education of the broad
user community of managers and employees who are supposed to
actually run the business with it.”2
The members of your organization already have a variety of skills
and competencies. But are these the skills and competencies you
2
Malcolm Wheatly, “ERP Training Stinks,” CIO Magazine, June 2000
16
need for your implementation or do you need new ones? And
how do you supplement them?
Earlier we discussed the need to identify leaders and business
stakeholders in the project preparation phase. This activity serves
as the initial “audience analysis” that you can use to outline skill
and competency requirements for your user population.
Your goal from a change management perspective is to
understand the impact your SAP solution will have on your
organization, then to examine your workforce, determine its cur-
rent skills, and identify any gaps between your current state and
your upcoming requirements. This will help you create the “tran-
sition plan,” a complete listing of the tasks and activities your
workforce will experience as part of the transition to your SAP so-
lution. When combined with your learning plan, you’ll have a
strategy for preparing them for the tasks they’ll encounter when
they go live and beyond.
In many organizations, employees’ jobs include multiple
roles. The challenge with such “jack of all trades” situations
is that this broad expertise is typically developed over time
through informal cross-training and knowledge transfer. In
these cases, consider the critical elements of each role and
focus on the near-term requirements while developing a
support process for additional skills that will gradually re-
build this diversified skill set in your people.
Normally, we don’t consider training or knowledge transfer to be
a formal part of the change management initiative, so we won’t
go into creating a training plan here. However, the information
you’ve gathered during the project preparation phase will serve as
important input for the people building your skill-development
plan during blueprint and realization.
However, a training plan is still something with which you should
be intimately familiar. You’ll want to review the plan and make
sure it addresses the skill sets your employees need, and establish
accountability for addressing those skills. Make certain to identify
the necessary skills or procedural changes that should be included
in training, but which are not directly software-related.
Your employees need to be fully prepared as well as trained
on how their jobs will be executed. For example, let’s
assume that a given plant manager at a construction mate-
rials company has been carrying out a “goods receipt”
process for raw materials every Friday when the plant is qui-
et. With the new business processes the company has identi-
fied, however, he will need to enter the “goods received” in-
formation into the SAP application immediately upon
receiving them. This would need to be communicated prior
to the training, or as part it, thus providing “a day in the
life” for this work role versus purely transactional training.
Your training department needs to build more than trans-
actional competence; it has to build understanding of the
complete business processes behind the transactions,
including all “who, what, when, where, and how” issues. It
is OCM’s job to make sure the training people know what
those issues are.
During the blueprint and realization phases, you’ll complete
your work-impact analysis: you’ll specifically indicate what
each role in your organization must be capable of doing and
whether or not the people in that role have the skills appro-
priate to execute against that work. This helps determine
what kind of knowledge transfer and skill development you’ll
need to accomplish.
While your OCM team is at work with that, the people responsible
for training should be developing and delivering their content.
Also in parallel, your organization should begin executing
business readiness activities – these are those activities outlined in
the Individual Leadership Action Plans to ensure each site is
“ready.” Such activities will continue right up to go-live and con-
tinue beyond.
Training will typically occur both pre-go-live and post-go-live, as
close to use as possible. Indeed, during the continuous improve-
ment phase, it’s important to focus on reinforcing the skills that
your workforce needs on a regular basis. Learning is more of a
“use it or lose it” phenomenon than we’d like to admit. Be sure to
analyze exactly how and what your users are doing during the
management phase. (Tools such as Knoa User Performance Man-
agement for SAP are useful during this period.) Find out where
your users are having problems and provide them with perform-
ance support to address those problems.
Performance management won’t just keep your users work-
ing more efficiently; it will also save your company a small
fortune. For example, an IDC study at a large consumer
company in 2006 estimated that each help-desk call took
employees away from their tasks by an average of eight min-
utes. Multiply those eight minutes by the number of work-
ers calling the help desk and the costs of maintaining the
help-desk staff, and you have an idea of how much money
can be saved by even a fractional reduction of these calls.
Regardless of the size or scale of your organization, the time
spent supporting employees is significant. By creating pre-
dictable patterns of support it is possible to minimize the in-
vestment and effort associated with ongoing performance
support.
17
Organizational Design and Structure
Like all organizations, yours has some kind of design and
structure; but is it aligned with the new processes and technology
you are implementing? Or do you need to make changes?
You’ll use your organizational design and structure lever to align
business and process requirements and metrics with process roles
and management structures.
Right at the start of your project – beginning in project prepara-
tion phase and continuing into blueprint – you’ll want to have an
accurate view of your organization’s business goals and opportu-
nities. You’ll need a snapshot of the current state of your business,
up-to-date organizational charts, and accurate role and job
descriptions. When you examine this documentation in light of
your business case and any other drivers for your project, you’ll
get a much clearer view of what may or may not have to change.
Early in the ASAP process, your SAP project team will have met to
design new business processes. Their results will be very
important for your change initiative. As part of the blueprint
phase, make sure you understand any impacts the new processes
will have on user roles. During realization, you’ll need to assess
the anticipated changes in skill requirements, roles, and account-
abilities resulting from the new processes and determine whether
your personnel will be responsible for doing the same things in a
different way or doing different things entirely.
It’s important to consider the scale of change for each role or
group of people and what support they need in making the
changes. For example, in our earlier discussion of skills and
competencies we examined the training needs of the plant
manager who handled the “goods receipt” process. It’s a true
story: when the manager was unclear about when he needed
to process the goods-receipt transaction, pallets of raw mate-
rials were arriving on schedule – but manufacturing shut
down because the SAP software indicated “no raw materials
available.” Good planning could have avoided the situation.
18
In the final preparation phase, you’ll develop organizational mod-
els and roles and responsibility definitions to support the identi-
fied business processes and goals. You’ll also help initiate the busi-
ness transition to your new solution, usually in partnership with
the leaders of your organization and your HR team.
The nature of the business process changes will dictate how orga-
nizational structure and individual roles change. For example, if
you are converting a business process dispersed throughout the
organization to one that is centralized, roles and organizational
structure will likely change significantly. You will have to revise
your organizational structure, establish new roles for individuals,
and create a new flow of information and work processes. This
type of change is considerably more significant than if you were
simply asking an individual to execute the same business process
with a new tool.
In the continuous improvement phase, you’ll be constantly work-
ing with leaders and managers to be sure your employees are per-
forming the tasks they’ve been assigned and that the appropriate
handoffs are taking place between team members. In addition,
you must verify that the organizational structures and support
systems are in place to keep the process moving efficiently.
In a way, each process within your organization is like a crazy relay
race; or rather, several relay crazy races running at the same time.
Batons can sometimes pass from one role to another (and then
back again) at a dizzying pace. Managers must act like gatekeepers
who communicate not only the individual roles and responsibili-
ties of each “runner,” but also where the handoffs occur across
multiple processes happening simultaneously. Clear definition of
roles and responsibilities and metrics is essential to have the infor-
mation available to users and managers to be clear on
expectations.
Communications
Almost everything depends on communications. How effectively
you deliver your various messages can make or break your change
project. A clear, well-crafted, and factual information flow can
build trust and acceptance. Infrequent, ambiguous, or misleading
information can cause resistance and suspicion. Your communi-
cation to your organization should include clearly explained busi-
ness impacts and process changes, roles and responsibilities, and
information about the benefits of the new solution.
If you have strong leaders who provide an equally strong commu-
nication channel, your OCM efforts should assist them by provid-
ing messaging they can deliver throughout your SAP project.
Lacking a strong communication mechanism, however, you will
need to create one. You’ll also need to develop the infrastructure
to support the messaging and expectations set in the individual
leadership action plans regarding communication.
As experienced managers will tell you, people issues are the root
of most project failures. And the typical root cause of these issues
is that the business leaders – executives, process owners,
operations staff – don’t agree on what business problem they’re
trying to solve, or what the best technology solution is, or even
that the problem needs fixing at all. Within the project
preparation phase, you need to establish a clear business case for
change.
Having a clear business case will ensure the expected
outcomes of your project, avoiding missed objectives, over-
spending, or an overly complex and cumbersome process.
The people in your organization don’t expect that you are
changing things for the sake of change. They want and need
to understand the business drivers behind the initiative.
Why does this implementation need to occur? Is it to
improve the way you do business? To reduce costs? Promote
growth? This context can provide the rationale that will
encourage user acceptance – and ultimately adoption,
both individually and organizationally. Resistance to
change is typically higher if these business drivers are not
communicated.
Once you’ve defined the business drivers, you’ll be able to
communicate your vision. Your messaging should include
anticipated project outcomes and a clear statement of the
benefits the organization expects to derive from its new
SAP solution.
During project preparation, you should start communicating
this information through a formal project kickoff. This will allow
the vision of leaders to be shared and subsequently developed into
goals that will translate into concrete plans for project execution.
At this stage of the change management effort, we recommend
that you develop a change communications strategy to address
these requirements.
You can think of the communications lever as a marketing cam-
paign for your project. It includes both internal and external au-
diences, but especially targets your key stakeholders. The dual ob-
jectives are to develop a plan to engage stakeholders and to create
a strategy for ongoing communications with your internal and
external audiences.
Note: A stakeholder mobilization campaign is an effective
technique for engaging key stakeholders and will be reviewed in
Chapter 3.
Gaining the stakeholders’ acceptance and commitment is critical
to a successful launch. This effort will involve explaining to each
individual what to expect from this project, what is expected of
him or her, and what constitutes your vision of success.
In the blueprint phase, you build upon your initial framework to
set up a tactical plan for communicating across your
19
organization. Referring to your change communications strategy,
you must now decide how to approach each of your intended au-
diences. Which messages apply to which audiences? What’s the
timing of the messaging? What is the best delivery mechanism?
You have many delivery options, from face-to-face interaction to
written communications to multimedia. You must also take into
consideration the needs of your audiences – for example,
language or cultural differences – when selecting means of deliv-
ery. In some cultures, receiving major communications from the
corporate or head office is deemed more significant; in others,
employees find it more meaningful to receive communications
directly from their managers. Understand your culture and pro-
vide communications from the most trusted source, which is of-
ten the direct line manager. Create your tactical communications
plan early in your communications planning. Such a plan focuses
on these audience and logistical questions, helping you execute
your strategy for communications.
There are many vehicles available for communication. In a
smaller organization be sure to take advantage of direct
contact with employees. This will minimize cost in terms of
communication processes and infrastructure while utiliz-
ing the most potent change vehicle available – direct com-
munication between leadership and the organization.
As you enter the realization phase, focus on two important levels
of communication. First, create the standard messaging that you
deliver to the entire organization. This messaging focuses on
broad-based information – for example, the business rationale for
project activities, actual milestones, or project success stories.
The second level focuses on communications targeted to the lo-
cal or site level. You’ll typically create these messages for specific
audiences rather than your entire organization. For example, you
20
may need to communicate at a training event at one of your facili-
ties or at a particular location for a site-specific go-live.
During realization and final preparation, be sure that the timely
and consistent execution of communication continues at both
the broad, organizational level and the more specific local level for
each site or group. It’s also particularly important to allow for
feedback; two-way communication will enable you to refine mes-
saging to address core issues for each relevant audience.
Communication becomes primarily site-specific as you focus on
the final preparation and go-live and support stages of your
implementation and post-go-live improvement activities. During
continuous improvement, particularly if your project involves
multiple implementations or upgrades, be prepared for questions
from the people handling the rest of it. Once you’ve reached the
exalted state of “go-live,” you’ll likely be peppered with requests
for advice, reaction, and opinions. Remember that your answers
become part of the communications process for their part of the
project, and that by default, you’ve become one of their change
leaders; so make sure your answers are consistent with your com-
munications plans. You’ll also want to communicate proactively
with the people on the other part of the project: make sure you let
them know the process improvements you’ve discovered and the
lessons you’ve learned.
Governance and Compliance
Your organization will need clear assignments, roles, and respon-
sibilities regarding decision making and decision escalation. The
governance and compliance lever will help you create this struc-
ture and a culture of process compliance based on a specific, well-
defined set of standards.
Consider this: is your organization more bureaucratic
organization or is it fairly flexible? Is governance formal or infor-
mal? Is your organization process-compliant or varying in
approach? Whatever its style, the way your organization is
managed and functions will influence the way you make decisions
and put new business processes in place, both during your project
and in the long term.
When you set project roles and responsibilities, you’re using a key
function of your governance and compliance lever. It’s something
that should be completed very early in the project preparation
phase. It’s during project preparation that you’ll align groups and
their leaders to specific components of the project and establish
their accountability for the success of those components. You’ll
also want to establish who has decision-making authority for
which steps along the way so there is no question later if indeed
the road gets bumpy.
You’ll also want to put together an issue escalation process just in
case one of those bumps turns into a mountain. For example,
when you are defining business processes during the blueprint
phase, you may discover that there are duplicate or conflicting
ways of performing the same task. Typically the project team is re-
sponsible for developing a common approach; however, someone
in your organization must be responsible for making the final de-
cision. Here, in the project preparation phase, you need to decide
who is responsible for making, implementing, and enforcing these
choices.
As you begin to align people and groups with project roles and re-
sponsibilities, make sure to keep leaders aware of the implications
of their decisions and actions. You should also make sure your
business owners stay abreast of process changes and understand
the escalation process while you’re still in the project preparation
phase. If they don’t, your blueprint process could be impeded with
unclear decision making or lengthy and confusing escalations.
In the blueprint and realization phases, the steering committee
meets regularly to provide direction and reinforce progress.
Let’s take a look at an example of how your steering
committee or leadership team might act to clarify roles and
responsibility changes resulting from your project. Not long
ago SAP Education worked with an organization that had
manufacturing plants all over the world. Each plant
employed forklift operators, but in Europe the operators
were classified by the local union into three different posi-
tions: forklift operators who moved raw materials, those
who transported work in progress, and those who moved
finished goods. In North America, on the other hand, there
was only a single role.
At first glance, this did not appear to be a big issue. But the
project team was unable to agree on how to define the posi-
tions, which could have resulted in lot of additional work, as
each role required unique security definitions, training and
support planning, hiring plans, and so forth. But after con-
sulting with business process owners and business leaders,
the steering committee found that a single job definition
would be sufficient, even given the European requirements.
The European branches were happy as long as the three em-
ployee groups were trained separately. The steering commit-
tee’s ability to balance local needs with efficient operations
made the difference and prevented a good deal of unneces-
sary redundancy.
While this example is global in nature, often organizations
develop with different processes being used at different loca-
tions – as close to each other as across the street. Reconciling
differences and selecting a shared path forward is what will
allow and afford your organization a simpler path forward.
These decisions will require alignment of leadership and de-
cision makers as they will be accountable for reinforcing and
coaching the organization through change.
21
As the nature of the upcoming changes in your organization be-
come more apparent during the realization phase, you’ll continue
to clarify expectations for the-post go-live environment for both
leaders and users. At this point, leaders must effectively (but po-
litely) reinforce the view that change is going to occur and it isn’t
optional. This reinforces direction and encourages user
acceptance and adoption. The organization will continue to assist
each person with adoption as the project moves forward to go-live
and beyond.
You’ll continue to reinforce user expectations and build process
change acceptance during the final preparation and go-live phas-
es. It’s particularly important for your leaders to visibly reinforce
process change during this period. With any new change there
will be a settling-in period when users feel uncomfortable doing
new work or working in a new way. Once the new work becomes
second nature, however, it will be more comfortable and perform-
ance will improve. It’s critically important for managers to
support their teams and team members during the transition.
Performance Management
The performance management lever ensures alignment of indi-
vidual performance with the organization’s strategies, goals, and
objectives.
Some organizations have mechanisms to measure and manage
performance on the job; others have very few. How will your or-
ganization measure performance after this change project?
Whether formal or informal, performance management processes
within a company tell employees what is important, what is
acceptable and desirable in work performance, and where to put
their effort and attention.
Most organizations use some type key performance indicators, or
KPIs, to measure the performance of their business processes and
subprocesses. It’s important to have a clear view of them; work in
tandem with your business process teams during the blueprint
22
phase to determine what KPIs (or other performance measures)
your organization will use to measure performance. Are they
connected to the same business goals that are driving this project?
If so, you can align the KPIs with specific user roles and responsi-
bilities. By aligning the success of the project with individual or
group performance measures, you’ll encourage individuals and
groups to behave in a way that will lead to your project’s success.
However you measure performance and project accounta-
bility, make sure you include the entire organization. Such
inclusion makes everyone accountable for the success of
your project – not just the project team. It also has another
effect: when the organization shares accountability, it also
feels a sense of shared ownership. As the old saying goes,
“people don’t hurt what they own.” People with a sense of
ownership are far more likely to be committed to the suc-
cess of your project than those who feel the new solution is
being forced on them.
Very simply, people pay attention to activities that engage
others. So be aware that the focus and attention by your or-
ganization guides the focus and attention of each employee.
As you begin development in the realization phase, make sure to
engage the extended change network you’ve developed for your
project. Your network, which includes subject-matter experts
(SMEs), user groups, and other stakeholders, can assist you with
testing, acceptance procedures, and performance support. By in-
volving this extended network, you reinforce shared ownership
across the organization and emphasize that project success doesn’t
just reside with the project team or the change team.
An important part of your work with your performance manage-
ment lever will be to build user-performance requirements and
expectations into your “role impacts” – your definition of how
the impending changes will affect user roles. (You’ve already done
part of that work if you’ve defined “work impacts.”) This will help
you establish the criteria by which you’ll determine that an indi-
vidual user or group has successfully transitioned to the new solu-
tion. After the go-live phase and during continuous improve-
ment, you’ll do performance checks on users or user groups to
find out how they’re doing against the KPIs you established earlier.
Note that some KPIs may have changed over time. It’s a wise prac-
tice to check your KPIs every time you change a business process
and to communicate any KPI changes to anyone who will be
affected.
You may also want to consider using actual user-performance
data to support your post-go-live coaching and reinforcement.
Products such as Knoa User Performance Management for SAP
can give you accurate metrics regarding how your users are doing
with their new responsibilities or tasks, right down to the individ-
ual user level if necessary. The more data you have, the better you
can manage user performance and the more easily you can identi-
fy the areas in which they need to improve.
Incentives and Rewards
Use the incentives and rewards lever to motivate individuals with-
in your organization to act in ways that will further your business
objectives. Incentives and rewards provide reward and recognition
and bonuses, promotions, and compensation consistent with
good performance.
How do you really motivate and reward your people? It’s not just
with money; there are other measures that drive behavior. If peo-
ple are clear what’s going to be measured and what’s important to
your company, they can focus on those things and behave accord-
ingly.
Use the project preparation phase to examine your project scope
and its expected results and benefits. Then assess how you’ll moti-
vate individuals and groups to achieve the desired project
outcomes. You may or may not require a change in financial re-
wards, but you’ll almost certainly require nonfinancial rewards
and recognition.
You can use the incentives and rewards lever in tandem with per-
formance management to motivate employees, encouraging
them to do what needs to be done quickly and effectively. In the
realization phase, review how you’ve defined your desired behav-
ior shifts and make sure you’ve clearly established responsibilities,
accountability, and the metrics to measure performance.
Create positive momentum in your organization by
promoting and publicizing actions and behaviors that mod-
el the changes you are looking for: bulletin boards, photos,
contests, newsletters, and so on are all useful to engage and
motivate performance.
As you move into final preparation and go-live, ensure that your
leaders and managers fully understand your incentive programs
and the goals they’re meant to achieve. You’ll also want to be cer-
tain to align any existing incentive programs with your new busi-
ness processes. The last thing you need is an incentive to do
things the old way!
Review your incentive program during continuous
improvement. Is the system now in place helping your organiza-
tion reach its desired results? You’ll need to check your business
metrics to make sure. If so, congratulations! If not, it’s time to re-
examine and redefine the program.
23
Hiring and Selection
Your hiring and selection activities (for example, retrain or hire;
grow organically or acquire) should focus on a single goal: build-
ing project success by building the right team at the right time.
Depending on your project’s scope and scale of impact, you may
need to employ a variety of strategies to successfully transition
and prepare your workforce. Are you bringing in the right people
to complement the skill sets of individuals already in your organi-
zation? Together, will they be able to execute the new business
processes and successfully operate the new systems you’re putting
in place?
Given your work with other levers through project preparation
and blueprint, you should have a clear, current snapshot of your
organization and its capabilities during the realization phase. You
should also have a very clear picture of how the project could im-
pact your organization. Use that picture to help you determine
personnel shifts or transitions you’ll have to make to achieve your
project and business goals.
In the realization phase, you should make sure that your
transition plan for new and existing employees has been
developed. Your plan should anticipate how any transitions will
change your organization and institute policies and procedures to
set expectations and deal with changes.
During design, you should also consider your “super user” strate-
gy. For example, you may want to create super-user skill sets
across the organization to reinforce and support the changes that
are coming until they become sustained and adopted across the
organization.
Many SAP customers successfully use “super user”
programs to offer user support. Typically, such programs
develop as an extension of the group, frequently called a
“center of excellence” (CoE), that provides ongoing user
and system support.
This network of super users will often create itself naturally
even if it is not formally managed or officially utilized. Any
group will find its “go-to” people and make use of them on
an informal basis. A formal, company-supported super-user
program, on the other hand, allows the official project and
support groups to leverage such “go-to” people or local ex-
perts as a mechanism for feedback and information flow. It
also allows for recognition of their efforts, an important
part of the incentives and rewards lever.
A May 2006 survey of SAP customers found that the compa-
nies that had the most successful support organizations had
a super-user program in place. These networks were organ-
ized either by business process or by functionality.
Most successful COEs have a ...but are aligned by business
Key/Power User program in place process rather than functionality
% of companies with Key/Power by only a small margin
User programs in place % of companies aligned by
business process
86%
62%
57%
50%

All companies Levels 4 and 5 All companies Levels 4 and 5

Figure 4: Super-User Programs in Successful Support Organizations

24
In realization and final preparation, you’re looking for confirma-
tion of any HR policies and practices that may be needed to sup-
port your business transition requirements. Will there be a reduc-
tion in workforce? Will you be transferring responsibilities to a
different area of the company that could result in relocation? Will
there be additional hiring or different skill-set requirements? Have
any jobs been reclassified through organization design and struc-
ture? Does your current staff have the necessary skills and compe-
tencies? For any of these, you should ensure that you have all of
your HR processes in place, either nationally, regionally or global-
ly, as appropriate for your organization.
When you complete your transition to go-live and move into the
continuous improvement phase, you should have a clear business
processes for developing, placing, or recruiting employees. With
roles defined and personnel processes in place, you can support
your organization when you need to add new skills and
competencies. Whether you provide these skills through new
hires or via transition work with existing employees, you’ll be sup-
porting your business goals with the appropriate individuals.
3. Create incentives and rewards that focus the sales organization
on implementing the new process.
4. Ensure strong leadership of your initiative, both from a sponsor-
ship and day-to-day leadership perspective
5. Select individuals within the organization who have the skills to
support the initiative, or hire individuals with these skills. (Or,
you may choose to do both.)
6. Track the performance of your organization in implementing
the new process, both from a user progress and development
standpoint and a results standpoint.
7. Through appropriate governance and compliance, make sure
that the right work is being done and measured. If your initia-
tive is successful, your measures will show a shift in behavior as
your sales organization integrates the new process into its daily
work.

Summary
As you can see, there is a strong integration across all of the eight
levers for change, enabling you to move smoothly from project
preparation through blueprint, realization, final preparation, go-
live and support, and continuous improvement. As a result, much
of the work you’re doing in each stream actually ends up being
leveraged across many areas.

Let’s look at an example. If your task were to introduce a new

process to a sales organization, your activities might involve the
following steps, though not necessarily in linear order:
1. Announce to everyone, through your leadership team, that the
goal of the sales organization is to implement and integrate the
new process and the technology that supports it.
2. Communicate requirements and expectations so that each indi-
vidual will understand what you are trying to achieve.

25
3. Organizational Change
Management and the ASAP Methodology
In this section of the SAP OCM Toolkit, we’ll follow the “ASAP
road map” as a way of organizing an OCM plan. As we look at
each of its phases, we’ll discuss appropriate OCM practices and
present tools you can use to help focus and direct your project.
Even if you’re not following ASAP for your SAP implementation
or upgrade, you’ll find it a good structure for organizing your
OCM plan.
Business
Drivers
Corporate Strategies Lead Change
✦ Leadership and Sponsorship ✦ Competencies and Skills
✦ Organizational Design ✦ Governance and Compliance
✦ Performance Management Systems ✦ Incentives and Rewards
✦ Hiring and Selection ✦ Communication Campaign
✦ Change Leadership ✦ Stakeholder Mgt.
✦ Business Readiness ✦ Organization Design
✦ Training & Go Live Support ✦ Change Communications
Improvement OCM Migrates Risk and Advances Success
Focus
Figure 5: The ASAP Methodology and OCM
Figure 5 summarizes what we discussed in Chapter 2. As you go
through the ASAP phases, your OCM activities should “leverage
the levers” to lead change, reduce risk, and help ensure a smooth
transition to your new SAP solution.
In this chapter we’ll present a series of common OCM practices
that will help you accomplish your objectives. But don’t assume
that there’s a discrete, self-contained set of OCM actions for each
phase: there won’t be. The change management activities we pres-
ent here may begin in one phase and extend well into the others.
In fact, they will probably continue beyond the confines of your
project. You’ll see some of the tools listed more than once, as they
apply to more than one phase of the message. The ASAP method-
ology gives us a familiar foundation for describing what you’ll be
doing, but don’t attempt to handcuff your activities to the phases
themselves.
26
In addition to the ASAP Roadmap, the SAP ASAP Focus approach
for packaged solutions fits the time lines and budgets of mid-market
companies choosing to implement their world-class mySAP ERP
solution in 15 weeks or less. Leveraging best practices in both
scenarios, all elements of the OCM Toolkit have been aligned with
the standard SAP ASAP and Focus methodologies.
Also for the purposes of this document, we’ll structure our pres-
entation around a new SAP implementation. But the phases and
the change activities within them will remain the same whether
you’re just getting started with a new SAP implementation or be-
ginning an upgrade.
Phase 1: Project Preparation
Key activities are to organize program leaders, key stakeholders,
and team resources around a clear success vision, program struc-
ture, and implementation plan, as follows:
• Assess organizational change history and transition risks
learned in prior implementations.
• Define the program business case and customize for each major
People stakeholder audience.
Process
Technology • Define a charter that empowers change leaders with authority
needed to promote a common platform to source business staff
and participation from other management.
• Identify business factions critical to program success.
• Develop a systematic organizational change strategy.
• Define clear SAP team roles and project-team training plan.
• Define a program governance process.
• Prepare leader messaging and startup communications
• Create an agreed way of collaborating with the sponsors who
fund, authorize, and promote program actions.
• Plan individual team activities and actions by implementation
role.
During Phase 1 of your change project, you’re going to be creating
the foundation for everything that follows. It’s during this phase
that you will determine your leadership teams, project strategy,
and communications and governance processes. Pay close atten-
tion: while each phase of our model is critical, the work you do
during project preparation will have the most far-reaching conse-
quences and the greatest effect on your project’s outcome.
OCM Practice:
Develop and Communicate a Clear Business Case for Change
SAP OCM Toolkit
A Business Case for Change
Actions
1. Collect business case documentation produced to date.
2. Interview senior business leaders regarding strategic business
context, business drivers, and the overall strategy for gaining a
competitive advantage.
3. Identify significant business drivers behind the initiative and
benefits expected from this change.
4. Document the business case by creating a clear rationale cover-
ing both technology and business perspectives and justifying the
case for change.
5. Refine or expand the business case where needed to address rel-
evance for each significant stakeholder group.
6. Create a standard story line articulating the business case for
change.
7. Share the standard story line across senior leaders; adjust or
refine the story line so that each leader is comfortable
explaining it.
Results: Clear Business Case for Change
This practice produces the following:
• A business case for transition that is explained in relevant
and compelling terms for each significant business group
• A strong, clearly defined platform for transition
• A clear vision for success that is articulated and shared
across the senior management ranks
For Further Reading
A Sample Project Kickoff Announcement
OCM Practice:
Conduct a Business Risk Assessment
SAP OCM Toolkit
The links below provide a series of models and tools for creating a
business risk assessment.
Conducting a Business Risk Assessment
Conducting a Business Risk Assessment Interview
Scoring Your Business Risk Assessment Interview
Sample Business Risk Assessment Invitation Letter
Your project implementers have likely already created a risk
assessment for your overall SAP project. Your OCM business risk
assessment, while similar, has a slightly different focus. Your busi-
ness risk assessment process creates an understanding of the busi-
ness challenges, obstacles, and complications (both real and imag-
ined) your project faces based on the views of a representative
cross-section of its stakeholders. As a first step, you’ll poll mem-
bers of your senior management team to identify their issues and
concerns. Then you’ll work with key personnel representing oth-
er business segments, such as process owners, site management,
and deployment teams.
You can use the information gathered in the business risk assess-
ment as input to the leadership action plans (described under
leadership and sponsorship) in an effort to build consensus about
items that could delay integration across business teams and
actions to mitigate these risks.
Actions
1. Develop business risk assessment interview questions.
2. Identify interview participants who represent a cross-section of
major stakeholders.
3. Interview senior management during the blueprint phase. (Re-
member that these efforts are not locked into individual phases;
this is an example, and more follow below.)
27
4. Analyze feedback and document findings and determine addi-
tional information to be gathered during the realization and fi-
nal preparation phase.
5. Update your initial list of interview participants to include other
business segments and roles (for example, process owners, site
management, deployment teams) during the realization and
final preparation project phase.
6. Conduct additional interviews. Analyze feedback, document
findings, and provide risk mitigation recommendations.
7. Conduct follow-up interviews or focus groups as needed to
manage complex implementation obstacles.
8. Conduct ongoing interviews at each implementation site (gen-
erally three to four months prior to that site’s go-live date). An-
alyze feedback, document site findings, and provide mitigation
recommendations to the local deployment team.
Results: Business Risk Assessment
• You identify risks to business integration success at the
outset of the project.
• Early in the project, you can identify and manage
challenges to project success.
• You can put in place risk mitigation actions and manage
them closely throughout the implementation.
For Further Reading
Sample Risk Assessment Questionnaire
Risk Workshop Objectives
OCM Risk and Activities Guide
OCM Practice:
Develop and Execute a Leadership Strategy
Developing a Leadership Strategy
Leadership Action Plans
Without strong leadership your OCM project has little
chance of success. It’s that simple. Make sure you take the
28
time to create a viable strategy and identify real leaders. While cor-
porate politics will always be a factor, try to involve those people
who truly have the power and influence to really lead.
A successful leadership strategy will do the following:
• Identify the leadership team
• Set expectations and identifies possible constraints
• Establish agreement on leadership roles and processes to create
a guiding coalition of leaders – a group of identified people who
will be the top-level owners of the business change process.
Actions
1. Review business case documentation.
2. Identify the leadership team members, critical sponsors, and in-
formal leaders for your initiative who will lead and influence
change.
3. Clarify leaders’ expectations.
4. Define decision-making roles and the level and type of partici-
pation.
5. Conduct individual work sessions to confirm agreement on
leadership roles, decision-making process steps, and method to
resolve implementation issues during the course of the project.
Results: Leadership Strategy
• Establishes a representative, motivated group of business
and project leaders to help guide the project
• Creates shared expectations and agreement on how exec-
utives, leaders, and sponsors will participate and fosters
support for the initiative
• Promotes timely decision making and problem solving to
resolve significant implementation challenges
• Creates shared ownership for the initiative
• Initiates or reinforces relationships that provide an
extended team and a feedback loop to the change team –
initiating your “change network”
OCM Practice:
Establish a Steering Committee
SAP OCM Toolkit
Sample Steering Committee Charter
Once you have identified your key leaders and decided on your
strategy, you’re should create a project steering committee and
clearly and explicitly define its roles and responsibilities. Such for-
mal definitions ensure that the roles and accountabilities of your
leaders are valid, well defined, and understood across the organi-
zation.
This steering committee will also be essential later in the project
to help address and resolve organizational challenges and other
implementation hurdles that are typical of any significant project.
To be successful, your steering committee should include business
leaders who have authority, credibility, and the respect of the peo-
ple with your organization. They should be able to promote a
shared sense of the direction of this project and reinforce the im-
portance of other business leaders’ participation.
Actions
1. Meet with business leaders to confirm the steering committee
scope, purpose, roles, and assigned tasks.
2. Define the steering committee charter, which should include
clear statements of your committee’s mission, roles, and vision
of business success.
3. Confirm and validate the charter with the steering committee
members.
4. Complete working sessions and workshops to confirm steering
committee assignments and responsibilities.
Results: Steering Committee
• Establishes a guiding team of senior leadership for the
project
• Creates shared expectations and agreement on how sen-
ior leadership will participate and support the initiative
• Promotes timely decision making and problem solving
For Further Reading
Sponsorship and Leadership White Paper
OCM Practice:
Build and Execute a Project Governance Procedure
SAP OCM Toolkit
Creating a Governance Strategy
A project governance strategy gives you agreed-upon ways to op-
erate within your project. With procedures clearly defined, busi-
ness sponsors (for example, the steering committee, senior man-
agement business stakeholders, and others) and process owners
who fund, authorize, and promote the project will be able to in-
teract using accepted rules of order. The result will be a far fewer
bumps in the project road than what might have occurred other-
wise.
As part of this procedure, you will define program team roles and
operating processes and prepare information packets for major
business stakeholders and groups to explain the roles and
processes.
Actions
1. Identify business leaders who are expected to play critical roles
in achieving project launch success and accelerating the
integration of new process and practices.
2. Develop a project governance charter that defines roles, scope,
and authorities (steering committee, senior business
management, process subject-matter experts, the SAP team,
and site management).
3. Define critical decision-making process steps and roles.
4. Define critical decision-making scope to be assigned to each
governance subteam (steering committee, senior business man-
agement, process subject-matter experts, the SAP team, and site
management).
5. Create materials and tools to orient members of the governance
team to their new roles.
29
6. Reach agreement with all relevant stakeholders on their roles,
assignments, and authorities.
7. Prepare information packets to introduce the project
governance mandate across the business and core team.
8. Conduct a project governance kickoff (in person or virtually by
phone or Web conference).
Results: Project Governance
By executing the project governance strategy, you accom-
plish the following:
• Positions senior managers and process owners for active
project involvement, early on
• Defines clear responsibilities for project governance
• Defines the scope for governance across the core team,
business stakeholders, project sponsors, and business
managers
• Creates a vehicle that helps core team members, business
stakeholders, and process owners make timely and consis-
tent decisions and resolve issues quickly
• Ensures that there are agreed ways of operating within the
project and for collaborating with important decision
makers across the organization (for example, the steering
committee, senior managers, business process owners,
and major stakeholders)
• Clearly communicates agreed ways of operating within
the project
• Develops broader awareness and support for project start-
up and blueprint activities, which help mobilize and align
the initiative with business management imperatives
• Gives the steering committee a clear, defined role in man-
aging organizational challenges and transition
implications from the outset
• Ensures that there is a steering committee in place with
representatives from business, IT, and program manage-
ment groups
30
OCM Practice:
Develop a Change Communications Strategy
SAP OCM Toolkit
Creating a Communications Strategy
As we mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, just about
everything in an OCM project depends on clear, effective commu-
nication. A key portion of your project preparation phase is to use
the communications lever to develop a strategy for communicat-
ing with the people whose acceptance and commitment are criti-
cal to a successful launch. To gain their acceptance, you must ex-
plain to each individual what to expect from this project, what is
expected of him or her, and what constitutes your vision of
“success.”
Actions
1. Develop a project branding strategy. Identify repeatable themes
to use in messaging and awareness events to inform and engage
business teams regarding project goals, the business case, imple-
mentation plans, and ways individuals and groups can promote
project success.
2. Create templates for project outputs: text documents, presenta-
tions, Web pages, newsletters, and so forth.
3. Work with project leaders and senior management within the
organization to craft key messages you can use to position your
project clearly and positively.
4. Identify the stakeholder audiences for your initial change com-
munications.
5. Develop a matrix that analyzes the combinations of business
stakeholder groups, communication objectives, key messages,
and potential delivery vehicles.
6. Develop a general strategy for delivering key messages across
stakeholder groups. Deliver these messages in phases across the
design and management phases (blueprint, realization, and fi-
nal preparation).
7. Continue to communicate beyond go-live to reinforce successes
and share new information.

Results: Communications Strategy
• Leads to consistent, visible communications encouraging
project support across the business effectively and
efficiently
• Creates a general vision of communication targets and
sets the stage for timely, consistent change communica-
tions to build understanding and encourage support
• Creates key messages tailored to different stakeholders for
the duration of the project and beyond
• Positions leaders and key stakeholders to deliver critical
messages to audiences systematically
• Leverages existing channels and identifies business gaps
For Further Reading
Communications White Paper
Phase 2: Business Blueprint
Forge agreements among change leaders that specify priorities,
decision-making roles, and individual actions that leaders can use
to ensure success within their teams. Make sure they understand
the business impacts of the SAP solution.
Actions
1. Develop a matrix of key stakeholders across the organization.
Plan for how significant business teams will be engaged
throughout the implementation.
2. Conduct work sessions with business executives and project
leaders that create a guiding coalition with a common focus
about how to lead the SAP initiative.
3. Develop a tactical communications plan for implementing the
strategy including key messages, vehicles, logistics and timing.
4. Understand business impacts of operating changes, new tools
and process enhancements on work roles, skill requirements
and team design.
5. Identify training curriculum requirements for highly impacted
users and others in the critical user audience.
6. Analyze new business roles, skill requirements and staffing gaps.
Use results to prepare a detailed curriculum plan, with learning
objectives by audience and user role, and create lesson plans
that equip users to be successful in the new work setting.
In the business blueprint section, your SAP project leaders will be
putting together the overall business blueprint, a detailed docu-
mentation of the results gathered during their requirements
workshops. Your OCM tasks during blueprint will focus on iden-
tifying required user skills, organizational structure, and job roles,
all with a view towards communications.
OCM Practice:
Devise and Execute a Tactical Communications Plan
SAP OCM Toolkit
Sample Communications Plan
Sample Detailed Communication Plan
Sample Key Messages
Tactical Communication Milestones and Road Map
Part of your blueprint phase is to set up a tactical plan for commu-
nicating across your organization. Using the techniques you
developed in your change communications strategy, you must
now decide how to approach each of your intended audiences.
Which messages should you apply to which audiences? What’s the
timing of the messaging? How and when should you deliver these
messages?
You have many delivery options, from face-to-face interaction to
written communications to multimedia. You must also take into
consideration the needs of your audiences – for example,
language or cultural differences – when selecting means of deliv-
ering information.
The success with which you craft and present your messaging will
in large part determine how people react to the change. Remem-
ber the old saying, “You only have one chance to make a first im-
pression.” Poorly planned and delivered messaging can actually
increase resistance to your project, so it’s critical to get it right the
first time.
31
The purpose of the tactical communications plan is to equip lead-
ers and key project members with the information, procedures,
and tools they need to communicate high-priority messages
clearly and consistently. This plan should leverage the existing
communications infrastructure within your organization to pro-
mote systematic, managed business awareness throughout the
project. If there is no formal infrastructure in place, you will need
to develop channels to support these communication activities.
As part of your business blueprint, make sure to precisely identify
your key messages, who needs to hear them, and how you’re go-
ing to deliver them. And don’t skimp on the last part – if you
don’t already have good communication channels in your organi-
zation, you will need to develop them.
During the realization phase you’ll start communicating this in-
formation through a formal project kickoff. This will allow the
corporate vision to be shared and subsequently developed into
goals that drive plans for successful execution.
Actions
1. Identify project leaders and senior managers who are expected
to play critical roles in promoting project awareness and
encouraging support.
2. Prepare information packets to inform and involve significant
stakeholder groups and deliver them via project kickoff com-
munications.
3. Create and distribute a project communications toolkit to
management.
4. Validate project messages with the steering committee and
other business leaders.
5. Develop tactical plans for communicating project communi-
cations and updates.
6. Tailor general project messages and media to specific internal
and external audiences, requirements, and information expec-
tations.
32
7. Refine the communications strategy analysis to specify target-
ed events, communication media, feedback channels, and tim-
ing across each major audience.
8. Develop a vehicle for stakeholder feedback. Your change net-
work – those leaders and stakeholders that act as an extension
to your team – is very valuable in this process.
9. If appropriate, work with your organization’s business commu-
nications team to distribute startup communications in accor-
dance with business protocols and the preliminary change
communications strategy.
10. Refine communication templates that can be easily modified
and updated as the project progresses.
Results: Tactical Communications Plan
• Institutes a plan for timely, consistent delivery of
communications using the best channels and messages
for each significant stakeholder audience
• Provides a road map and the infrastructure needed to
maintain systematic communications throughout the
initiative
• Helps business leaders and stakeholders understand clear-
ly who must perform specific communication roles, both
within deployment teams and across your larger organi-
zation
• Creates two-way feedback channels to help identify and
resolve critical issues early
• Establishes a foundation for ongoing communications
For Further Reading
Creating a Tactical Communications Plan
OCM Practice: For Further Reading
Build a Stakeholder Realization Campaign Plan OCM White Paper
SAP OCM Toolkit Sample OCM Plan
Building a Stakeholder Realization Plan Team Management White Paper
Facilitation Guidelines
The stakeholder realization campaign plan enables you to be
proactive about engaging significant business stakeholders OCM Practice:
throughout the implementation. Your plan helps avoid sporadic Create a Work-Impact Analysis
and haphazard communications and gives you greater opportuni- SAP OCM Toolkit
ty to manage resistance. Work-Impact Process

Actions
1. Determine the flow of business events, communications, and
local actions required to engage the people who can affect proj-
ect success.
2. Plan how significant business stakeholder groups will be
engaged throughout the project.
3. Define the interaction needed by each stakeholder group (from
SAP project leaders to business management to impacted em-
ployees).
4. Update and refine the plan by site at regular intervals (typically
a minimum of three to four times throughout your project)
Results: Stakeholder Realization Campaign Plan
• Reinforces your individual leadership action plans
• Establishes a guiding cross-section of IT, project, and busi-
ness leaders to deliver change communications
• Generates business participation, acceptance, and best-
case commitment through targeted involvement activi-
ties, messaging, and business awareness events
• Minimizes business resistance throughout the project
The work-impact analysis helps you understand the impact of in-
troducing new technology and business processes on work roles,
skill requirements, and team design. This analysis defines the new
and changing work practices, roles, responsibilities and account-
abilities your project will require. In addition, it identifies major
gaps or misalignments in existing business teams or work
practices. The findings will also help identify skill and competen-
cy gaps at both the job and work-group level and pass them to the
people developing training.
Actions
1. Interview core team leads and process subject-matter experts to
identify the impact of your project on existing work practices,
roles, and organizational structures.
2. Define new and changed work practices, roles, and responsi-
bilities.
3. Define major gaps or misalignments in existing business teams
or practices, including:
• Identifying new work required
• Identifying skill and competency required at the job level
• Analyzing skill gaps of your existing talent base compared to
new work requirements
4. Integrate work-impact findings into training and business tran-
sition recommendations.
5. Document findings and determine additional information to be
gathered.

33
6. Interview business stakeholders at launch sites and business
functions to confirm work-impact findings and identify any lo-
cal impacts specific to each respective deployment site.
7. Share evaluation results with the project office and incorporate
into leadership action plans.
Results: Work-Impact Analysis
• Helps business and project leaders clearly understand the
specific training required to fulfill new organization roles
and work practices
• Aligns business teams and infrastructure more quickly
with the new way of operating
• Staff effectiveness is accelerated in the new setting by
transition aids targeted to specific needs and gaps
• New skill requirements are addressed in a systematic tran-
sition plan
For Further Reading
Organizational Optimization White Paper
Risk and Impact Assessment and OCM White Paper
Phase 3: Realization
Actions
Equip business staff to be successful in new roles, from day one.
1. Reinforce understanding of the program business case across
employees, managers, and other stakeholders (alliance partners,
customers, vendors).
2. Create a business transition strategy to support highly impacted
teams across multiple business audiences.
3. Build site communications and transition aids to address com-
mon transition requirements.
34
Are You Handling Training, Too?
It’s not uncommon for the same people to handle change
management and training. If that’s the case for you, make sure to
consider these activities:
• Define training curriculum requirements for highly impacted
users and others in the critical user audience.
• Use business process profiles and other process documents to
design training content, and create work aids to shorten staff
time in performing effectively in the new setting.
• Create a tactical training plan defining delivery vehicles, core
curriculum, timing, execution logistics, and training evaluation
plan.
• Develop a site-specific training plan to jump-start success at
each major location or business unit.
• Deliver training in a cost- and time-efficient manner, while
maximizing access across multiple audiences and opportunity
to practice new skill sets before go-live.
OCM Practice:
How Will We Need to Organize? Organizational Design and
Structure
SAP OCM Toolkit
Work-Impact Process
The work-impact analysis you did for skills and competencies also
helps you to understand the impact of introducing new technolo-
gy and business processes on work roles and team design. Your
analysis will help you define the new and changing work
practices, roles, and team structures your project will require.
With the findings of the work-impact analysis, you will have a
clear understanding of the impact of your project on your organi-
zational structures and operating practices, which you can address
in your business transition planning.
Your analysis here is actually an extension of the work-impact
analysis we discussed during the business blueprint phase. It may
be useful to address all requirements simultaneously.
Actions
1. Interview core team leads and process subject-matter experts to
identify the impact of your project on existing work practices,
roles, and organizational structures.
2. Define new and changed roles and organizational structures.
3. Define major gaps or misalignments in existing business teams
or practices and identify how those gaps will affect your current
staffing.
4. Recommend changes to existing organizational structures and
work practices to support the new way of operating.
5. Integrate work-impact findings into training and business tran-
sition recommendations.
6. Document findings and determine additional information to be
gathered.
7. Interview business stakeholders at launch sites and business
functions to confirm work-impact findings and to identify any
local impacts specific to each deployment site.
8. Share evaluation results with the project office and incorporate
into the leadership action plans.
Results: Organizational Design and Structure
• Gives you an understanding of the project’s impact on ex-
isting organizational structures and operating practices,
and provides the opportunity to integrate these factors
into your overall business transition preparations
• Gives business and project leaders a clear understanding
of the specific training and staffing required to fulfill new
organizational roles and work practices
• Aligns business teams and infrastructure more quickly
with the new way of operating
• Accelerates staff effectiveness in the new setting with
transition aids targeted to specific needs and gaps
• Addresses new organizational roles in a systematic transi-
tion plan
For Further Reading
Organizational Optimization White Paper
Risk and Impact Assessment and OCM White Paper
OCM Practice:
Complete Role Descriptions
Before you move into the final preparation phase, you will need a
complete cataloguing of the various roles that will be necessary to
operate, manage, and support your SAP solution. This informa-
tion will serve as input to the final preparation phase as you deter-
mine your hiring and selection needs. Your OCM team, HR
department, or a combination of both may complete your role or
job descriptions. Combined with the findings of the work-impact
analysis, these descriptions will give you a clear picture of the role
changes you’ve established and enable you to clearly document
expectations and accountabilities.
There is no specific tool for this practice, but you may wish to fol-
low the steps below:
Actions
1. Gather all existing job information: job descriptions and related
documents.
2. Complete the work-impact analysis and identify changes to
roles.
3. Gather process metrics from the process teams and define
appropriate metrics by role.
4. Document the changes to roles and metrics into role
descriptions.
35
5. Communicate these changes to management and develop a
plan for communicating these changes to users.
6. Communicate these changes to the training team so that the
work practices can be reinforced during training.
Results
• Sets and documents clear expectations for each role
• Outlines metrics for each role
• Addresses new organization roles are addressed in a
systematic transition plan.
Sample Role-Mapping Steps
1. Define roles based on business process.
2. Map current positions to roles.
– Map training courses and roles.
– Validate courses and local training schedule.
3. Identify gaps between current positions and roles.
4. Capture questions and discussion points from gap analysis.
– Resolve with project and execution teams, or
– Escalate to steering committee, and if necessary the senior
management committee
– Update role template and document exceptions
– Communicate changes to training
5. Assess and document impacts of activity and role changes.
6. Communicate changes to employees prior to training,
including.
– New activities to be performed post-go-live
– Current activities no longer performed post-go-live
– Current activities that will continue to be performed
36
Phase 4: Final Preparation
Actions
Create a clear strategy to transition staff to the new setting in
smoothly and seamlessly.
1. Prepare senior leadership to drive business change across their
direct reports and management ranks.
2. Prepare local leadership to drive change within their teams.
3. Define a clear transition strategy to address universal and local
implementation challenges (addressing procedure changes,
training needs, organizational redesign, and new performance
expectations).
4. Build specific transition plans for each major user group to ac-
celerate full performance in the new setting. (Local teams
should have a clear understanding of what changes to expect
and how to get help for successful migration to the new
setting.)
5. Adapt HR and other business programs to reinforce desired new
behaviors and work methods, improving business integration
and staff ability to achieve high performance sooner rather than
later.
OCM Practice:
OCM Practice: Business Readiness Planning
SAP OCM Toolkit
Sample Business Readiness Plan
Business Readiness Survey
As you prepare to go live at last, make sure your organization is
ready to make the leap. Even though you’ve been preparing for
this moment for quite some time, there are still some actions you
can take to minimize disruption – particularly among those em-
ployees who are more likely to be disrupted by the change.
Actions
1. Identify the headquarters and local leaders who are expected
to play critical roles in achieving program success.
2. Define a systematic transition strategy for guiding employees
and managers during the transition.
3. Document the HR implications for transitioning staff to new
roles and work practices in the new setting.
4. Document the implications for each employee group that will
make a transition.
5. Create a detailed transition strategy for staff in highly impacted
work roles.
6. Integrate new work roles into existing work teams and job as-
signments and outline specific steps to transition staff into
them.
7. Assess the extent of the impact on and needs of displaced em-
ployees.
8. Guide managers to prepare individual staff transition plans for
their teams.
9. Lead sessions with local managers to prepare them to conduct
one-on-one action planning with their people.
10. Produce specific tools and aids to prepare local managers to
drive the transition of their teams.
11. Coordinate and monitor staff transition to new roles.
Results: Business Readiness Planning
• Promotes a smooth transition through clear, consistent
communication from leaders across their teams
• Minimizes the risk of business disruption and accelerates
realization of benefits from new work and process
enhancements
• Factors people preparation into project plans, timelines,
and resource requirements
• Institutes a clear strategy for managing staff transition
• Focuses transition resources and effort where the impact
is greatest
• Enables significant challenges to be handled early
• Minimizes risks to business continuity because employee
transition is well planned
• Ensures timely, fact-based employee communication that
addresses relevant local issues
• Focuses local resources and effort where payoff is greatest
• Encourages constructive conversations between supervi-
sors and their employees, leading to agreed-upon actions
to promote a smooth implementation
• Helps staff focus on adapting to the new setting effectively
and efficiently
• Minimizes dysfunctional behavior
OCM Practice:
Do We Have the Right People?
SAP OCM Toolkit
Recruiting and Staffing
Sample Recruiting and Staffing Plan
As we get ready to go live, it’s time to take a good look at your
people. First of all, do you have the right people? From the skill in-
ventories and analyses of job roles you’ve compiled earlier, you
should have a good idea by now of the skills your current employ-
ees have and the roles you need to fill. Now it’s time to match
them.
During final preparation, it’s wise to create personnel strategies
that will help build your organization or team with the right skills
and competencies at the right time. For example, does it make
more sense to retrain or hire?
You should also make sure that your transition plan for new and
existing employees is in place. Your plan should anticipate how
any transitions will change your organization and establish poli-
cies and procedures to set expectations and deal with changes.
37
OCM Practice:
Incentives and Rewards
SAP OCM Toolkit
Total Rewards
In truth, it often takes more than just good communication to get
people excited about change. Sometimes they need a little extra
motivation, and it’s a wise planner who recognizes that need and
leverages it.
Incentives take many forms, and they’re not always financial.
Recognition can be almost anything: public kudos, small gift cer-
tificates, company logo clothing, whatever works.
The important thing is to avoid taking employee performance for
granted, despite the work you’ve done to achieve it. It’s easy to say
that people know what their jobs demand and ought to perform
as expected. Human nature, however, proves that adequate train-
ing and a good job description aren’t always enough. To illustrate,
let’s remember the hugely salaried professional athletes who still
demand an “incentive clause” in their contracts.
Phase 5: Go-Live and Support
Actions
Stabilize operations and introduce mechanisms for continuous
improvement.
1. Celebrate launch success.
2. Survey business leadership regarding launch success. Collect
suggestions for what worked and what didn’t. Provide
recommendations to reinforce use of new procedures and tools
across the business.
3. Update business-case KPIs and measure progress to achieve val-
ue realization of benefits expected.
4. Track user performance to date; validate adoption of new work
methods, operating practices, and acquisition of new skills.
38
5. Analyze impacts of new operating practice and roles on existing
performance management and rewards systems. Recommend
adjustments to accelerate integration of enhanced tools and
processes to meet new performance expectations.
6. Update individual development plans for highly impacted staff.
Engaged Leaders and Stakeholders
When you move into the go-live phase of your project, your cor-
porate leaders should be visibly and proactively displaying the be-
haviors outlined during planning. Their objectives should be
quite clear at this point, and they should be out there meeting
with stakeholders and listening to their questions. Such activities
as live “fireside chats” or “lunch and learn” sessions can go a long
way toward building trust with the employees.
Even more important than listening to concerns, however, is act-
ing on them. By now you should have a governance policy (see
the “Governance and Compliance” section above) with clear pro-
cedures for acting on issues. Make sure you carry them out and
report back to the employees who raised them. Nothing will
quash positive attitudes faster than perceived insincerity on the
part of management.
Make sure your leadership has high-profile visibility as you move
into go-live. Having them publicly express congratulations and
enthusiasm – and awarding those nonmonetary incentives – will
help build a sense of ownership for your new solution. No one
wants to be left out of the team; it’s up to your leadership to rein-
force the perception that there indeed is a team.
The hubbub of go-live will disappear soon enough, and after
awhile use of the new tools and procedures will become routine.
While leaders may not exercise as much of a cheerleader function
during the support phase, they will still be actively involved. It will
be up to the leadership team to examine both financial and proce-
dural results and visibly advocate any further changes necessary.
OCM Practice:
Celebrate Go-Live!
By the time you’re ready for final preparation and go-live, your
workforce now understands the reasons for the change, knows its
part in it, and is ready to embrace it. Nevertheless, there’s still a
good deal left to do.
Many companies will celebrate go-live, and no wonder: it’s
frequently the culmination of a major project involving many
people. But holding a celebration is also good change
management, because it informs any employee who still “doesn’t
get it” that everyone else is invested in the SAP solution and con-
siders its readiness a major milestone. Whether you provide “SAP
Go-Live” t-shirts to the troops, order pizza for the whole staff, or
send congratulatory messages, making a fuss helps.
As you go live, your incentive and reward lever can provide a ma-
jor strategic advantage. Here’s the time when you can add a little
competition, fun – and enthusiasm – to your rollout. It may
sound silly –- your colleagues may not seem like the type to get
motivated by contests and prizes – but if you’ve ever seen people
react at trade shows, you know that such things can be powerful
motivators.
Create a contest to see which department shows the fewest user
errors in the month after rollout; track the errors with your per-
formance monitoring tool and give the winning department a
handsome reward. Check with your HR department about cash
rewards. Better still, find out if an individual’s proficiency with the
new software can be built into his or her performance objectives.
For example, the objective might be to reduce error rates by 5%. If
you have a user-performance management system in place, you
can check.
As time goes on and user performance improves, such things may
be less necessary. But it’s never a bad idea to build positive associa-
tions with your SAP solution.
Phase 6: Continuous Improvement
Actions
Define performance management metrics, monitor user
performance, identify areas for user and process improvement.
OCM Practice:
How Are They Doing? The Performance Management Lever
SAP OCM Toolkit
Team Management Fundamentals
Sample Performance Management Checklist
Sample Success Metrics
Once you’ve “thrown the switch” and gone live, your users
should already have the skills and understanding they need to
carry out their daily operations. However, there are a few things to
consider once you’re up and running.
The first is to remember that user competence is not a fixed state.
No matter how successfully your initial training has gone, a com-
bination of employee turnover, “pass-the-baton” training, and
employee bad habits can leave an organization with seriously de-
pleted skills in only a few years, especially if those skills aren’t rein-
forced.
For example, at the ASUG Annual Conference in 2004, a large na-
tional media company revealed that neither its documentation
nor user competence had been addressed since its initial SAP im-
plementation in 1998, despite regular upgrades. As you might
guess, the company’s return on investment had suffered. Only
with a concentrated effort to ensure the ongoing competence and
confidence of their users did results begin to improve. Indeed, as a
2006 report from IDC indicates, “Training on complex systems is a
never-ending cycle. There are always new processes, new employ-
ees, and new locations that must be brought up to speed or
brought online, and no group can be left out.”3
39
As we mentioned in Chapter 2, employee skills can deteriorate
quickly. In fact, if your training period occurred too early before
go-live (a more common situation that we’d like to see), your end
users may have lost a good deal of what they learned before they
touch a live system. If that’s the case, your go-live will be met with
large-scale frustration.
To prevent such disasters from occurring, try to make sure your
users have “fingertip knowledge” available in the form of easily ac-
cessible print or online documentation. Online, context-sensitive
help will be particularly useful here.
Be sure to analyze exactly how and what your users are doing dur-
ing the management phase. Tools such as Knoa User Performance
Management for SAP are useful during this period. Find out
where your users are having problems and provide them with per-
formance support to address those problems.
Not only will this keep your users working more efficiently, it will
also save your company a small fortune. For example, a 2006 IDC
study at a large consumer company estimated that each help-desk
call took employees away from their tasks by an average of eight
minutes. Multiply those eight minutes by the number of workers
calling the help desk and the costs of maintaining the help-desk
staff, and you have an idea of how much money can be saved by
even a fractional reduction of these calls.
While we’re on the subject of help-desk calls – make sure your
management checks the help-desk log on a regular basis. That’s
often a good source of information about where user “push-back”
might be occurring and additional OCM activities are necessary.
OCM Practice:
Reinforcing Processes
We’re probably all too familiar with this situation: the
organization goes to great lengths to create and document new
40
processes, then blithely ignores them. From go-live onward, you
should consider monitoring your new processes to make sure the
company is executing them faithfully and correctly. Certainly in
this day of strict government compliance laws such as the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act, doing so becomes critical.
Your communications and leadership levers become particularly
important tools here. Make sure your leadership regularly
reinforces your employees’ understanding, not only of the
processes themselves, but of the consequences of not following
them.
As you monitor your processes, look for potential improvements
in them. A process that works poorly or imperfectly will create
bottlenecks and frustration and retard acceptance of your new so-
lution.
OCM Practice:
Refining Organizational Design and Structure
Once your solution has gone live, most of your organizationalal
design and structure work will have been completed. However, it’s
not completely out of the way. As you continue with day-to-day
operations, you’ll be regularly checking whether your change
management team is executing the tasks they’ve been assigned
and that the appropriate handoffs are taking place among the
team members.
Just as you monitored and refined employee processes as part of
the governance and compliance lever, you’ll also regularly refine
change-team processes to make sure your team can execute effec-
tively. In addition, you’ll want to verify that the organizational
structures and support systems you put in place are keeping the
process moving efficiently.
OCM Practice:
Hiring and Selection During Continuous Improvement
Employee turnover is a constant reality in any business. Even if
you have fully staffed any new roles after go-live, you’ll need to re-
place some of them at some point. You may also determine that
some people just aren’t getting the job done and need to be trans-
ferred or replaced. Or you may note that patterns of usage suggest
that new positions be created.
A good part of change management is to always be on the alert for
talent. Let your line managers know of the needs you have, even
for unofficial roles – they’ll help you identify the right people.
Use your user-performance monitoring software to help you de-
termine top performers who may be able to move into some of
those roles. Examine the results of your communications effort
and identify natural change leaders among your employees.
OCM Practice:
Communications During Continuous Improvement
SAP OCM Toolkit
Lessons-Learned Guidelines
Many SAP projects involve multiple implementations – perhaps at
different plants or in different departments. If your project is first
to reach go-live, be prepared to be peppered with requests for ad-
vice, reaction, and opinions. Remember that your answers
become part of the communications process for the other parts of
the project, and that by default, you’ve become one of their
change leaders – so make sure your answers are consistent with
your communications plans. You’ll also want to communicate
proactively with the people on other parts of the project: make
sure you let them know the process improvements you’ve discov-
ered and lessons you’ve learned.
Once you’ve reached go-live, you might want to pay particular at-
tention to local communications. Your SAP implementation may
stretch across multiple sites, and each site may have OCM issues of
its own. Once the big picture is under control, take some time to
look at each site individually and see if and where you need to
communicate additional information.
Remember that like user skills, user acceptance can be fleeting. If
there are glitches with any part of your system, you’ll need good
OCM communications to reassure your users. It’s good policy to
ensure regular communications to the field after the project goes
live – providing a source of announcements, helpful hints, notifi-
cation of policy or process changes, and so forth can keep your
user communities engaged and involved.
The continuous improvement phase also gives you the opportu-
nity to reinforce the goodwill towards your SAP implementation
that you created earlier in the ASAP process. For example, this is
an excellent time to remind people why the company implement-
ed SAP solutions in the first place, and how the implementation is
beginning to pay dividends. You might also want to take this op-
portunity to communicate lessons learned and celebrate a
successful end to the overall project.
We mentioned feedback earlier in this toolkit. Once you reach the
continuous improvement phase, remember that even though
your project may be officially complete, organizational change
management is an ongoing process. Take advantage of the contin-
uous improvement phase to capture feedback from your users –
where did your OCM plan succeed? Where could it have done bet-
ter? Where did it successfully create anticipated attitudes and be-
haviors and where did it fail? If you can create a safe (that is,
anonymous) vehicle to collect stakeholders’ opinions and evalua-
tions of your project, by all means do so.
You’ll undoubtedly be traveling down the OCM path again. The
more accurate your feedback is now, the better the process will be
in the future.
41
Appendix: Links to OCM Tools For Further Reading
Creating a Tactical Communications Plan
Phase 1: Project Preparation OCM White Paper
SAP OCM Toolkit Sample OCM Plan
A Business Case for Change Team Management White Paper
Conducting a Business Risk Assessment Facilitation Guidelines
Conducting a Business Risk Assessment Interview
Scoring Your Business Risk Assessment Interview Phase 3: Realization
Sample Business Risk Assessment Invitation Letter SAP OCM Toolkit
Developing a Leadership Strategy Work-Impact Process
Sample Steering Committee Charter Business Readiness Plan
Creating a Governance Strategy Recruiting and Staffing Plan
Creating a Communications Strategy Impact Mapping and Transition Plan
OCM Change Charter White Paper
OCM Risk Assessment White Paper For Further Reading
Stakeholder Analysis White Paper Organizational Optimization White Paper
Risk Impact Assessment and OCM Plan White Paper
Phase 4: Final Preparation
For Further Reading SAP OCM Toolkit
A Sample Project Kickoff Announcement Business OCM Readiness Survey
Sample Risk Assessment Questionnaire Recruiting and Staffing
Risk Workshop Objectives Total Rewards
OCM Risk and Activities Guide
Sponsorship and Leadership White Paper Phases 5 and 6: Go-Live, Support, and Continuous
Communications White Paper Improvement
SAP OCM Toolkit
Phase 2: Business Blueprint Team Management Fundamentals
SAP OCM Toolkit Sample Performance Management Checklist
Sample Communications Plan Sample Success Metrics
Sample Detailed Communication Plan Learning From Your Project
Sample “Key Messages”
Tactical Communication Milestones and Road Map
Building a Stakeholder Realization Plan
Stakeholder Mobilization Plan
Leadership Action Plan

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