Brief

This company is on a mission to become Australia’s preferred telecommunications provider. In mid-2014, this company released four new mobile handset plans to the market, enabling customers to share data between their mobile phone and their tablet. Internally, this change resulted in the removal of several legacy plans, the creation of new processes, enhancements to existing systems and a new customer conversation at the frontline. The change impacted customers and approximately 8,000 employees in Australia and offshore.

The prevailing change environment was complex with frequent shifting of the ‘goal posts’. Although this company was accustomed to the ‘idea of change’, their overall change maturity level was low. Restructures that occurred during the project lifecycle also impacted staff morale. This resulted in a negative knock-on effect each time project scope or milestone dates changed, creating a state of ‘change fatigue’.

The project and business teams were unaccustomed to planning for embedding change and handover to a business as usual state.  Typically, once a product has been delivered to market, project teams would step away without emphasis on assessing how the change had landed in the business.

Solution

Our change management approach aimed to:

• assess whether impacted business units were properly engaged pre, during and post launch
• align our change management approaches with the ‘go to market’ and project methodologies
• integrate the newly created internal change management methodology and operating model
• facilitate greater collaboration between Sales and Customer Operations to produce a single, integrated delivery plan
• develop a concise and fit-for-purpose communications plan
• assess the capability requirements and best methods of training delivery as per level of impact and geographic location
• build and empower a team of change advocates to work on business readiness for 8,000 employees

Results

Blue Seed involvement helped the business:

• enable cross- functional planning and delivery, without silos along the value chain
• control communication mechanisms
• prevent gaps and any duplication of work (as often seen on previous projects)
• attain 100% attendance for training across all business units – this had never been achieved before
• achieve the highest new customer conversion rate in the first month of launching
• engage with each business unit and provision a mechanism for feedback
• put response mechanisms in place for response actions and feedback up and down the business hierarchy
• retain ongoing engagement from the project team post launch