Involving End Users in Big Change

In its Agenda Overview for Business Process Management, 2015, Gartner makes it clear that the primary challenge businesses face today is their ability to cope with and achieve Big Change. Business disruption is a constant reality, and organizational change agents must be equipped with the proper tools and mindset to adapt their organization to meet its challenges.

The most significant aspect of the Big Change phenomenon is that the pace of change is accelerating. This leaves organizations no choice but to scrap traditional IT philosophies and techniques, and create new frameworks for keeping up with change.

The Unique Position of the End User

One area that is often overlooked when it comes to Big Change, is the importance of the users of the system. For the sake of this article, we will include both entry level end users, their managers and department heads in this equation. End users hold the unique position of being able to see how the system is actually functioning in real life, in a very hands on way. Their hands. In many cases, they will be the first people to recognize changes in the environment which affect the system. These could either be things that are starting to go wrong, or alternatively, new opportunities for how to improve outcomes.

That’s why it’s important to provide all end users with an easy-to-use, attractive and intuitive feedback mechanism. This mechanism should enable end users to communicate problems and opportunities for improvement to management and the IT team in charge of the system, so that the organization can react to changes quickly.

So how should a Feedback Loop be implemented in the application? Five words: Be Creative, Keep it Simple. Feedback should not require more than 1-2 minutes to provide, and often even a couple seconds of feedback as enough. As such, look for ways to build feedback mechanisms into the system that are fun, visual, quick and unobtrusive, but that can capture important user reactions at critical stages of the process.

Let’s Get More Advanced
Give users who want to become more involved, tools to provide more extensive feedback. A couple clicks might take such users to a portal which enables them to suggest a new feature, or a change request, where they can provide more detail and the reasons for the change.

If you’d like to get even more advanced, consider leveraging the power of Social. Once several users are making requests for Change, consider opening up these requests for voting in a Social Networking style. This way, suggestions that have the power of the majority will get priority.

At the far end of the idea of End User involvement, the future could see organizations providing an ‘Assemble Your Solution’ portal, which enables department heads and managers to select their own solution from an available tool kit, and either build it themselves, or get the IT team off to good start with the specs already in place.

In Short…
In order to keep up with Big Change, you need to give all of your teams the ability to contribute and communicate with each other. End User feedback is just the right place to start.

SOURCE: BPMLeader