Change Management: Increasing the Speed of Adoption

The Challenge:

• The client – a large mining firm—wanted to implement a new software application in one of their Chilean sites. The new system was meant to make their operations safer by allowing people to better report and track health, safety, and environmental incidents and near hits
• A previous experience at another site showed that people didn’t use the system until a year after it was implemented

The Question:

• How can we ensure that people utilize the tool from the day it is implemented, realizing its benefits for the organization?

Our solution:

• We developed a communication strategy by which we empowered the Site’s General Manager to introduce the new system to his leadership team. Each leader was asked to cascade the communication down to their teams using a number of communication aids that we prepared
• The training approach was designed to equip users with the skills they needed to perform their jobs in the application effectively. This included “hands on” exercises and  practical support materials

The Results:

• In less than 6 weeks, we developed and delivered communication and training materials to get users comfortable with the application
• Ninety users were trained and started logging incidents in the application short after its implementation. The measures of adoption we developed (e.g., incidents logged in the application over incidents occurred) indicate high levels of usage and adoption