Change Management Skills for ERP Implementation Success

Change Management Skills for ERP Implementation Turn a Struggling Transformation Around

Redwood Shores, CA – LSA Global, a leading business consulting, coaching, and training firm that helps fast-growth life sciences, technology, and services companies align culture and talent with strategy, today announced results from a highly customized change management training initiative designed to strengthen change management skills for ERP implementation at a leading financial services firm.

The program targeted a select group of change leaders and change catalysts responsible for one of the most difficult — and most frequently underestimated — parts of any major ERP transformation: winning the hearts and minds of the people who must adopt new ways of working.

The customized training program results were strong:

• 97.2% Job Relevance
• 98% Satisfaction
• 124% Knowledge Gain
• 94.8% Net Promoter Score

When an ERP Implementation Becomes a Business Transformation

The fast-growing financial services firm had ambitious strategic goals: double revenue, increase efficiency by 50%, and maintain high levels of client satisfaction and employee engagement.

To help make those goals possible, the company decided to heavily customize and implement Salesforce as an enterprise-wide platform replacing more than 50 disparate systems and processes.

The technology was supposed to simplify the business. Instead, 12 months into the initiative, deadlines had been missed, costs were escalating, and leadership recognized a critical gap: the system integrator had technical expertise but lacked the change management consulting capabilities required to mobilize the organization.

Two priorities became clear:

• Design a Practical Change Management Plan
  Create a pragmatic change roadmap that key stakeholders would commit to and that fit the firm’s unique strategy, culture, people, and capabilities.
• Make Change Happen
  Equip leaders and change catalysts to successfully execute the people side of the ERP transformation — building understanding, alignment, commitment, adoption, and accountability.

5 Change Management Skills for ERP Implementation Success
Before developing skills, the project leadership team first needed to get aligned. That meant establishing a shared view of the current state, business case for change, change urgency, dissatisfaction with the status quo, goals, success metrics, roles, stakeholders, scope, assumptions, and critical interdependencies.

With that foundation in place, we focused on five areas:

1. Mobilize Change Leaders and Catalysts
   Define selection criteria and establish a Change Leadership Team and core network of Change Catalysts with the credibility, influence, and commitment required to champion new ways of working.
2. Build a Compelling Change Communication Framework
   Create a master change communication strategy that leaders and catalysts could use to consistently explain why the transformation mattered, what was changing, and what stakeholders needed to do differently.
3. Establish a Change Readiness Baseline
   Assess change readiness across critical stakeholder groups to identify change resistance, commitment, capability gaps, and adoption risks before they threatened implementation.
4. Build Practical Change Management Skills
   Equip Change Catalysts and the Change Leadership Team with the skills required to navigate the people side of ERP implementation — including stakeholder engagement, communication, accountability, feedback, resistance, and behavior change.
5. Turn Training Into a 90-Day Change Roadmap
   Convert learning into specific actions around communication, pulse checks, stakeholder engagement, accountability, feedback, and ongoing assessment of change leadership and catalyst effectiveness.

The Bottom Line
ERP implementations are rarely about the technology. They succeed when people understand the business case, believe the change is worth the disruption, know what they must do differently, and have the skills and support to adopt new ways of working. If your ERP strategy is technologically sophisticated but your change management capabilities are weak, your implementation is carrying a major execution risk. The smartest ERP transformations treat stakeholder alignment, behavior change, and adoption with the same discipline as system design, configuration, and deployment.

To learn why transformations stall — and what effective leaders do differently — download The 5 Science-Backed Change Leadership Practices That Drive Successful Transformation

About LSA Global
Founded in 1995, LSA Global is a trusted performance consulting and training firm that helps high-growth technology, services, and life sciences companies turn strategy into measurable results. We partner with executive teams to build competitive advantage by aligning culture and talent with strategy — so individuals, teams, and organizations perform at their peak. Learn more about how organizational alignment drives performance.

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.