Change Management: Prioritizing Technology Deployment and Adoption with L.O.V.E.
Technology professionals face a constant barrage of requests to implement and deploy applications to meet the needs of various parts of their organization. Without a formalized process to direct traffic in the flurry of application requests, things can get messy fast; leading to frustration, lack of trusts, and siloed technology adoption. Leveraging some of the baseline principles from change management frameworks, you can provide some structure to this to receive and send the information needed to set realistic expectations on deployment capabilities.
One excellent way of prioritizing is understanding the level of value and effort for the applications to be deployed. Value and effort are evaluated from many perspectives, so having a solid understanding of your stakeholders is critical to conduct this sort of analysis. This methodology is easy to remember with the LOVE acronym:
Level
Of
Value
Effort
Where do I start?
Step 1: Determine the level of value by strategically evaluating the business implications of implementing the GIS application, technology, and/or information. Some example questions to consider include:
- How does this support our strategic goals, objectives, initiatives?
- How will this help us in the long term and short term?
- What parts of our organization can/will benefit from the adoption of this application?
Keeping this simple is key, as it will need to be actionable. For example, ranking from 1-3 or Low-Medium-High value.
Step 2: Determine the level of effort for deploying AND maintaining the GIS data, information and/or application. The level of effort can be determined by answering questions such as:
- How much time will this take our IT team to develop, test, and deploy?
- What training/skills gaps exist that need to be considered?
- Will my team be willing and able to adopt this into their workflows?
Use the same scale that you used in step 1 for the sake of consistency and simplicity. (i.e. rank 1-3, or low-medium-high)
Step 3: Evaluate the results from Step 1 and Step 2 to determine where you have high value and low level of effort. These will be imperative to establish quick-wins and build momentum for your transformation. The high value, high level of effort initiatives are candidates for doing formal change management and project plans. They’ll require a more significant planning effort, but since they are high-value, the ROI makes it justifiable. The image below is a good reference for putting this to use:
These 3 steps are often things we think about but don’t formally document. By having this documented, assumptions are avoided and collaboration with stakeholders is encouraged.