Telenet is the largest provider of cable broadband services in Belgium, and was going through a business-wide transformation. To do this successfully, it was imperative they had effective change management in place – with the help of Project One consultants. Simon Kane, an expert involved in the project, explains six ways the project left a lasting legacy for their client.
Following the acquisition of the mobile telecom operator BASE Company by Telenet, a strategic review of the core IT platforms was undertaken, including the critical CRM and BSS (Billing) systems across the two companies. The aim of the exercise was to develop an approach to consolidate the key IT systems onto a single platform to serve both customer bases. One of the options generated by the review was to move to a new greenfield platform, and it was this path that was selected by the Telenet Senior Leadership Team following a strong recommendation from the IT domain.
The vision was for Telenet to design and build a platform that would realise a clear ‘Digital First’ strategy for customers on both the BASE and Telenet brands. Driving real and tangible simplification was also at the heart of the thinking e.g. less development, more configuration, and empowering people to be able to drive faster change.
As a result, the Darwin Programme was conceived to integrate the two highly successful companies onto a single platform. The Business Case for Darwin was based on retiring BASE legacy systems, optimising operations, enabling customers to self-serve, and driving Business (Corporate Customer) sales.
Project One led the transformation with a Programme Director and defined and led the change management and readiness with a Change Management lead. We also provided the Project Management Office (PMO) for the initiative.
The Approach
Involvement of the business teams and leaders in all aspects of the activity was critical to the eventual outcomes and successful completion of the programme. The role of the change manager was to influence and shape the programme to ensure that the change management criteria for success were built in from day one.
By ensuring involvement in every stage of the programme, all operational teams understood the vision, direction, status, and challenges of the change and were positioned to prepare their organisations to operate the change successfully.
The whole programme was driven from business outcomes and the involvement of the operational teams and leaders was driven by following six principles:
1. Involvement in vision and outcomes
Why this is important
The programme was business driven from the start. Leaders from the commercial and operational parts of the business worked to define the outcomes expected from the project, and thus owned the achievement of these outcomes.
How we did it
At the start of the project, we set up a Change Management forum, focusing on the main decisions that the business would need to take to achieve the desired outcomes. We ran these as key design decisions that the business teams would need to answer before any technical design could begin. This set the business teams at the heart of the programme and ensured that they felt ownership over the vision and direction.
This progressed alongside the Design Authority, which ensured that people from the operational business were as involved the way the operations would work in the future, along with how it would be implemented.
2. Involvement in shaping the design
Why is this important
Any programme consists of changes to systems, processes, roles and behaviours. The challenge to make a successful change increases in this order, with changing systems being the easiest and changing behaviours the hardest.
The principle underpinning successful acceptance of change is that if you have been involved in the design (along with testing and deploying), you are very much more likely to adopt and embrace it. So, ensuring that level of involvement and transparency, so that operational teams and leaders can see their involvement, adds effort to the development of the programme but smooths implementation and adoption when that support is really needed.
How we did it
To be involved at the level needed to make a meaningful contribution to a change, requires time and effort. Operational organisations do not have a level of capacity that allows this to be done with their existing staff base.
Therefore, from the start of the programme we worked with the operational leaders to plan out what additional resource they would need to support those design, testing and implementation efforts and helped them build the case for bringing in additional staff to backfill the key resources who would be involved in the programme.
This also involved people stepping up inside the organisation to take on more senior roles while those team leaders were part of the programme. Building up this change capacity early in the life of the programme was probably the most important change intervention completed.
3. Involvement in shaping the change
Why is this important
The people who are going to be operating the new ways of working must feel that they have had a say in when and how the programme is delivered. Much as in any programme we design for the customer outcomes, we also need to ensure that we are designing for the operational outcomes. This is a fully employee and customer centric approach to delivering a change programme.
How we did it
Each of the releases of the technology was designed from a business perspective, with functionality logically grouped together and planned so that a meaningful and relevant set of technology is deployed at the same time, and everything that operations need to run it is included in the release. This then shapes the backlog and priority of the development activities, which along with the customer view and the technology priorities are shaped together to form the programme delivery.
The recipients of change have decided and shaped how their future will be deployed and therefore are deeply committed to ensuring it is a success.
4. Leadership aligned and all involved
Why this is important
Programme leadership and operational leadership can often have different views of what readiness means and when a programme is ready to be deployed. By having a fully transparent, and joint, governance and decision-making approach there is a much stronger alignment about how to launch programme outputs into operation.
How we did it
When we took go / no go decisions for each of the releases in the programme this was a joint decision. The change team ensured that each leader had a clear view of the impacts on their organisation in advance of the decision. This included the changes that they would be implementing and any outstanding bugs that would have to be worked around.
With this, each go / no go decision was taken in full transparency of what the operational impact was and meant that everyone in a leadership role understood the challenges and risks each time a new part of the technology was made live. Throughout the programme, the Chief Customer Officer ran a session with her team ensuring everyone understood the challenges and risks. This meant all operational leaders progressed through the programme with the right expectations and resilience to fully implement the new ways of working.
All people doing Business Acceptance Testing and Trialling were drawn from operational business, which also meant that leaders understood the readiness of the systems from people who were in their own organisation along with the programme testing. This was separate and complementary to technical testing to ensure business processes worked as intended.
5. Involvement in rigorous training, piloting, and communications
Why this is important
Having communications and training that immediately feels relevant to front line staff is one of the success factors of any change programme. While it often gets left until last and must be fitted in between technology driven deadlines, it has to be built from the perspective of the ultimate recipient. Embedding the impact assessment and training into the programme and involving recipients in the development means we deliver interventions that are more impactful.
How we did it
Before each release of the programme a detailed change impact assessment was conducted. This was done by the business analysts on the programme and then worked through with training teams, knowledge managers and the operational teams themselves. This ensured that not only did all teams get a truly clear assessment of what they would have to do for each release, that understanding was fully embedded in any communication and training that was delivered.
As the same teams were conducing user testing, they could add the final relevant insights for their colleagues so that everything that went to a recipient of the change was seen through the lens of the front-line staff working on the programme.
For training, at each significant release, face to face training was given to all operations teams. This involved scheduling people to be taken out of the business for 5 days at a time. This applied to retail, contact centre and back-office teams.
6. Involvement in sustaining and embedding the change
Why this is important
Much of the effort to make a change work for the recipients, comes after the implementation. To make this successful, all the elements discussed previously have to be in place, along with a comprehensive plan of how the change will embed itself into the operating fabric of the organisation.
How we did this
People from operations were involved as subject matter experts (SMEs) in the design, writing and executing tests to ensure processes were manageable and building in continuous improvement into the programme process.
We built an allowance for updates based on experience of people using the processes into the programme schedule, so changes based on early use could be efficiently implemented.
People who had been testers and SMEs were used to coaching and guiding people during the programme and continued these roles once we had gone live.
All of these elements built the practice of embedding the change and continuously improving it into operations, so it continued seamlessly once the programme had closed.
Benefits
Darwin was a programme that set the digital future for Telenet. To implement this scale of change we knew that driving it from the operational business would be central to the success.
Involving as many people from the operations as possible was a central tenet of the programme and the change management approach. By starting this approach early, we were able to ensure that funding for backfilling operational roles (to allow key people to join programme activities) would be part of the programme budget.
Coaching operational leaders as to how much involvement they needed and building their case for hiring additional staff during the programme lifecycle, enabled all the involvement activity that was part of the change management plan.
This ensured that we were able to develop and refine, the right systems, processes, roles and behaviours for the future of Telenet, a future that is now in full operation.