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Rapid readiness effort ensures property business ready to leverage analytics capability

Brief

Our client is a top ASX listed Property Group. Its key businesses span across the Office, Industrial and Retail portfolios. There was a need to implement a Business Intelligence solution (IBM Cognos TM1) to improve the organisations reporting and analytics capability and support future growth.

The project commenced in 2013 and had been running for eight months before Blue Seed Consulting was engaged to manage the change management stream. The project was grappling with some health issues – behind schedule, high team turnover and little or no attention to the people elements of the change. It was a phased implementation over a 9-month period. The ultimate goal was to implement an optimal suite of standardised reports and analytics capability for compliance and operational reporting. Multiple impacted groups were identified, across a range of roles and with a domestic geographical spread.

Solution

Blue Seed Consulting was engaged to work immediately on Phase 1, which was due for delivery within 6 weeks. It was necessary to assess change readiness and project awareness in light of the project history and failure to deliver to date. Time was also invested in working closely with the new Project Manager and team to ensure alignment between project and change delivery cycles.

The Blue Seed consultant quickly compiled a stakeholder analysis map and undertook a number of short face-to-face meetings with key impacted individuals, to understand current awareness, readiness and high-level impacts. A review of all existing project documents and communications delivered to date was also completed to ascertain project scope and status but also to understand what had been communicated, to whom and when.

A comprehensive impact assessment was completed along with training needs analysis to determine the training, communication and engagement requirements for each group. Running in parallel, a number of senior management, sponsor and stakeholder presentations were delivered to improve understanding of the change process (at organisational and individual level) and to build change capability and maturity across the organisational hierarchy.

Two SME working parties were established to enable training content development over a 4-week period with staggered review and sign-off cycles. Marketing and Communications teams were engaged to assist with the branding and formatting of content and to provide support for the delivery of key messages and targeted communications.

Results

In partnership with the Client, Blue Seed Consulting provided expertise particularly in the areas of stakeholder and SME engagement and the delivery of tailored technical training programs for key impacted groups. This was combined with various hands-on activities and interventions, such as focus groups and feedback sessions. An agreed Support Model was put in place, which included an intranet TM1 training and support page as a one-stop-shop for TM1 Help, support, information and TM1 report training videos. User adoption was driven through the team managers and functional leads and it was monitored and reported back to the business on a monthly basis. Phase 1 successfully completed for Office and Industrial in Q3 2014.

The second phase of work (phase 1.5) was targeted at Retail and Corporate businesses and was made up of a number of scheduled releases across a 6-month period, completing in April 2015. Tailored training programs and materials were again delivered locally and interstate to impacted individuals as per plan. A robust report change request process was implemented as a mechanism for report feedback and prioritisation of continuous improvements. In addition, a number of change management templates and tools were added to the organisations project toolkit for future use.