Addressing Change Management in Data & Analytics

Key Takeaways

whenever you're trying to change culture there's always some in fact trying to change anything at all that work there's always someone who complains uh and so uh I think we need to talk a little bit about change management so if you have employees who are kind of pushing back going well this is the way I've been doing things for like three decades now I'm not going to change my practices how do you get them to how do you encourage them to uh make more use of data or change your tools and things like that um okay so best practices for change management uh who wants to go first uh uh I can start okay cool only because I have a funny analogy um when I first started out like forget like way before um Tom Davenport came out with the article that said here's the sexy new career data scientist so a decade before that right I would go I started in Investment Banking and so I would go into in the the company and I would say yeah we're GNA use data and analytics to talk to your clients and they would say to me what what are you talking about I've had had these relationships with these clients for 20 years 25 years like what on Earth are you going to tell me using data and analytics that I don't already know about these clients because you know it's a very um relationship driven business in that space right and so scalability is not the same as when we think about it in the consumer facing spaces it's just a funny analogy to your point um but I think one of the things that you do to help adopt change I would say two things actually one is I've learned over the years that Pilots are really helpful like poc's proof of Concepts like let's not we're not going to blil the ocean we're not going to change all your processes today and start doing things new tomorrow we're GNA do take a little sample of people and do a pilot and let's see if it works and then if it does then let's talk about the next step like incremental steps to get people to buy in coupled with their this is Key by the way their involvement and own own ship right they have to be involved in the decisionmaking process we have to go out and get their input particularly from the naysayers and we have to empower them to take ownership of the changes and the impact right because then they feel accountable and once you get people to feel accountable for something they are more likely to be in support of it and to try to drive it Forward successfully I love the idea of a proof of concept um Laura it seems like you might have some ideas around this well not around the proof of concept but honestly I was thinking as Tiffany was kind of talking I really want to understand why people have that kind of fixed mindset what is that stemming from of why they're afraid of the change and that's really important for me to know as a stakeholder if they say hey I've been doing this for the last 10 years and I don't want to change is it because they fear their job's going to go away right is it because they don't see value in what you're doing right um and so really understanding that why uh with folks that kind of fear that change you can then address it accordingly right and that's been how I've kind of approached it in the past and it's really been successful