Challenges

The restructuring in an organization is a great challenge as well as an opportunity. My organization  has seen a recent restructuring where global sales team performance tracking teams had been  centralized under the umbrella of one Centre of Excellence. This had been a strategic step to  improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the organizations and the new team formed, had new  personnel who had to take over the new roles under new guidance. The change management  around the new operating environment has been enormous as there was very less transparency in  the previous operating environment. The internal customers (Sales team) have been apprehensive  about the changes as this will impact the performance based calculations of incentives – a direct  monetary impact. My task as the project manager was to create a framework where cross functional  teams such as IT, product development team, incentive calculation team, Sales team and some more  partner teams worked together to help the sales organization that drives > $20B revenue for the  company. The challenge was to tell a story to build trust and transition to normal day-to-day  operations quickly.

Tool Selection

The communication is the heart of the change management. However the simplicity of the  communication is downright critical when it comes to buy-ins from stakeholders and ongoing trust in  the process. I have engaged with a consulting team to extract information about how the transaction  data stored in the Big data platform that circle around the organization and tell a visually compelling  story about the dependency on each party’s role for making the timely and accurate payments for  sales team incentives. The tool of choice was to have visualization for enhanced transparency for  different parties involved who are located in multiple locations globally. Face to Face conversations  was not efficient and timely for such a large undertaking. So we have built a standardized and highly  visual communication framework.

Tool Application

There were different visualization templates created for different parties (one for senior leaders and  decisions makers, one for a big internal ecosystem including all the partners (IT, product etc.) who  are contributors in the whole chain and final one for frontline sales team)

Senior leader visualization tools are a summarized version of the status of the transition, ongoing  quantification of categorical risks and steps taken to mitigate.

The second (more detailed ones) was for key contributors in the E2E chain who gets to receive the  health of ongoing cycles and challenges to critical path of execution. This visualization was important  to identify initial challenges and repeatable fallouts and publish the quantifiable issue, challenges  and drivers and provide an opportunity to each party in the big ecosystem to re-evaluate their  internal process. The simplicity of a consistent simple message about the process from the beginning  is important to build trust on the new COE. The Use Case diagrams for all critical paths were shared

with this ecosystem. This included everyone’s roles, responsibilities and SLA and was communicated  to these internal partners as rules of engagement.

Finally, an ongoing simple message to Sales team on the status of incentives and payout dates was  devised.

Insight and Approach

Building out the tool for the first time, the message has more verbal sections in it. Additionally, the  face to face storytelling technique was employed in the beginning of transition to have more  engagement and stronger relationship, but later on as the COE story settled in for good, the verbal  meetings were less frequent and mode of status-based-storytelling were converted into pictorial  format.

Based on feedback from different individuals, the template was made less wordy and more intuitive.  Additionally the insights were based on one single visualization template too. But as one size does  not fit all, the intent of communication and the change management was overlooked by many as the  language was not customized to the way they can respond to e.g. the sales team leadership was  spending way too much time in the detailed working of the internal workings of partner teams, the  frontline sales teams were aggravated to see way too much information that do not impact their day  to day jobs and the internal ecosystem partners did not see what actions they need to take. Finally,  after separating the communication and visualization technique for each group, we have nailed the  desired actions from each party i.e. the sales team and their leadership got back their time to focus  on building more sales pipeline and found transparency (without too much details that threw them  way) and finally every partner in the ecosystem identified actionable insights that help them change  their process to align in the new operating environment.

