A Full Guide to Change Management and Technology Implementation
You know that legal technology like contract lifecycle management (CLM) will give your team the power to stay on top of things and innovate more, but you also worry that you’ll spend all that money on a product that no one will use and that doesn’t deliver the outcomes you’d hoped for.
Your concern is valid — we’re living in a time of major economic uncertainty and many tech buyers experience buyer’s remorse. Tech implementations are delayed when the right people aren’t in on the buying decision, the most affected people are left in the dark, and there’s no comprehensive understanding of how the tool will impact your business.
This is why change management is an essential part of your tech adoption and implementation process. Change management smooths the path between your old process and ideal future state. It manages expectations, reduces resistance to change, and increases adoption.
Here’s how effective change management enables smoother tech implementation and higher engagement across your organization.
You can’t outrun technology: The benefits of technology and challenges of implementation
The legal industry is becoming more comfortable with technology and adopting software at higher rates. Your legal team is becoming more dependent on workflow automation tools to tackle your growing to-do list, data analysis tools to make sense of your contract data, and eSignature solutions to capture agreement faster.
Tech tools can help your legal team achieve 352% ROI, streamline the most tedious parts of your day, and uncover trends that a manual process would hide. Being more tech savvy is a good thing — the struggle comes when you don’t do your due diligence in evaluating new tools. When that happens, your implementation process will pop all kinds of red flags and rob you of the promised benefits.
When implementation gets challenging
Sometimes, despite your best efforts, tech implementation doesn’t go the way you expect. This can be due to a lack of proper preparation, no internal support, and unrealistic expectations.
Let’s dig into those a little more:
Lack of preparation: Preparing for implementation means ensuring your processes are in order, you understand your vendor’s scope of work, and you lead with your goals. Failure to prepare can result in expensive delays and stressful implementations, causing more grief than it alleviates.
No internal support: Without internal support and stakeholder buy-in, your new tool or process won’t feel the full transformational impact. Rather than being integrated into key processes, your new technology becomes yet another tool you have to maneuver during key business processes.
Unrealistic expectations: The goal of any piece of technology is to make its users’ lives easier. However, it can’t magically improve (or even automate) a process that doesn’t exist. For example, if you don’t know where your contracts are, it’s hard to organize them into a centralized repository.
All of these challenges add months to your timeline, ultimately costing your company more than the price tag of the tool. This friction may be enough to make you skeptical about buying a piece of software, but you can address these challenges before they become an issue.
Addressing these challenges at the root
Integrating change management into your technology implementation process is key to starting off on the right foot.
Some of the biggest problems before and after the implementation process come from a poorly enabled team.
A change management strategy helps you to align your team on the intent to buy the tool, the purpose it will serve, and ways it will change their daily lives.
Understanding change management
The only thing constant in the business world is change. There are often new best practices to learn, regulations to be aware of, trends to track, and market conditions to adapt to. Businesses pivot frequently, especially when you’re still finding product-market fit, entering a new market, or failing to meet existing strategic objectives. Developing a change management strategy will help navigate these transitions.
Change management is a set of approaches, strategies, plans, and processes you put in place to minimize disruption to your team’s operations in the event of major change. Change management ensures that everyone affected by the change is aware of it, let in on the reason behind it, and enabled to thrive in the new normal.
Significance of change management at enterprise
Your company, fully embracing digital transformation, is adopting more enterprise legal management (ELM) solutions like CLM, eSignature, and legal project management. Change management covers the gap between your old, manual processes, and a future state in which your team uses the tool and maximizes efficiency.
According to Gartner, about 50% of change initiatives fail, with only 34% being clear successes. Without proper change management, it’s harder to reap the benefits of the tool. Your ROI will be less than projected, your team will end up sticking with the status quo, and the shiny new technology will gather virtual dust in the cloud. But research shows that companies who prioritize change management are more likely to meet their objectives and stay on budget.
6 key elements of change management
An effective change management strategy has the following components:
Clear objectives: These are your goals for the new technology or process. What will the change look like and what is your desired outcome? Knowing this helps you to be more targeted in your approach to change management.
Stakeholder analysis: Affecting change requires input from many cross-functional teams. Who are the stakeholders of this project and how do they understand the problem/solution? Multiple perspectives let you consider sides you hadn’t before.
Communication: No matter how good your plan is, it’s likely to fall short if you don’t talk about it with the people involved. Communicate to your team the planned change, perceived benefits, and what that means for them. This is key to increasing engagement, adoption, and buy-in.
Training and support: Provide training and support to help your team get familiar (and fall in love) with the new tool. Remember, not everyone learns the same, so be sure to prepare different kinds of resources and training opportunities for your team.
Implementation plan: This is the actual plan — project timelines, milestones, responsibilities. If your vendor offers customer support, don’t be afraid to lean on their expertise during this transition.
Monitor and evaluate: Implementation alone isn’t the end goal. To track your success, regularly review progress, address any challenges, and adjust the strategy as needed. Don’t forget to celebrate your wins!
If you’re thinking about bringing on a solution like CLM or legal-specific project management, a change management strategy will be crucial to ensuring adoption and long-term success. There’s no one-size-fits-all change management plan or process, but you can use (or customize) one of several change management models according to your business needs.
Using change management to enable successful technology implementation
Resistance to change derails the potential success of your transformation initiatives. Getting your team to change the way you do things — even if the old way caused stress dreams and close calls — can feel like pulling teeth. After all, an object at rest will continue to stay at rest and all that.
A change management strategy helps grease the proverbial wheels of change. It’s up to business leaders to foster a culture of embracing change and build an internal infrastructure that is sturdy and flexible enough to withstand your company’s many changes. Also, changes that have a wider reach within your organization — affect multiple teams, cost above a certain dollar amount, have privacy implications, etc. — need leadership’s buy-in from the beginning. This goes a long way in enabling widespread adoption and long-term success.
Using the elements of change management to guide your strategy avoids a lot of the issues that might arise in implementing new technology. Change management works because it prepares people and lets them know what to expect. That reduces the anxiety of uncertainty and gives your team the confidence to take on whatever change may come.
A few more tips for navigating tech implementation
Start with the process: Before you even think about implementing CLM technology, make sure you’re clear on what your existing process is or if you even have one. As Lucy Bassli says, “You can’t slap technology onto a bad process. You can’t automate something that you don’t quite understand.” For example, who on your team is allowed to create contracts and who has clearance to approve them? Knowing that allows you to design a contract process that suits you rather than make one up in the moment.
Expect delays in the beginning: People adjust to change at their own pace. Don’t get too worried when you aren’t seeing immediate efficiency changes — it takes time to build up the muscle of routine. Factor delays into your implementation plan so it’s built into the timeline. Also, no adoption plan is perfect, so get comfortable with a few growing pains.
Lean on your solution vendor for support: You shouldn’t have to walk the road of technology implementation alone. Your vendor should provide support in helping you understand your progress and build a process that maps to your internal workflows. If they don’t provide support, evaluate whether they’re the right solution for you.
When in doubt, communicate: A communication plan is an essential part of every change management strategy. During the implementation process, you have a responsibility to your team, leaders, and other end users to communicate the objectives, planned training, the progress of the implementation itself, and other material issues that might arise.
How do you know when your tech implementation and change management have been successful?
You’ve made a change management plan and implemented a new tech solution — now it's time to measure its effectiveness. Create key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your ROI and measure how well you meet the objectives you set in your change management plan.
KPIs: Choose KPIs that clearly illustrate the impact of your new tool or process. For example, if you implemented a CLM tool to execute contracts more quickly, you can track KPIs like turnaround time, number of redlining turns, and volume of finalized contracts over a period of time.
Benchmarking: Another clear way to measure how far you’ve come is through benchmarking. In preparation for onboarding a new tool, track metrics for your old process. That way, you can compare your new metrics to the old standards and confirm your gains.
ROI: Seeing a return on your investment is a crucial measurement of post-implementation success. ROI indicates how much value a tool gives back and how quickly.
Opportunities to adapt and improve
As your responsibilities, org structure, and business priorities shift, so will the way you use this tool. Over time, your team will get used to the tool and use cases might change. To keep seeing a return on your tool and prevent stagnation, regularly review your processes and use KPIs to identify opportunities for improvement.
For example, in the beginning, you might be using CLM to make sure your contract terms are consistent across agreements. But after you become more familiar with the tool, you might begin to make more use of templates, or enable self-service contract creation for terms under a certain value.
Eventually, the new will become old, and new processes or tech implementations will require change management. Remember, change isn’t static — it’s an ongoing process.
Conclusion and future outlook
A business that doesn’t change, doesn’t grow. Instead of being fearful or avoidant, your business should embrace change. Embracing change can mean adopting a new governance structure, shifting company messaging, or implementing powerful technology to unify cross-functional workflows. Whatever the change, it’s important that you execute using a change management lens.
A change management strategy makes change easier to navigate, as it lets people know what to expect. It helps leaders and stakeholders get crystal clear on their objectives, what processes are being impacted, and what an ideal future state looks like. It’s crucial for successful tech implementation because it sets expectations at the beginning, addressing potential bottlenecks and pitfalls as early as possible in the process.
Implement CLM using a change management process. To reduce the chances of buyer’s regret, be sure to do your homework before making a purchase and create a plan for enabling the rest of your team. This way, you increase user adoption and experience a shorter time to value (TTV).
If your team is ready for CLM, contact us today.