Before lunch, Paula Smith the records manager at Pharmac presented on Effective Follow Through and Management of your Systems Post Roll-out. On reflection, it appears that this presentation was a broad and general analysis (eg, wisdom to embrace drawn from many projects that Paula has been involved with), not a specific case study on Pharmac.

Key question: how do you set the expectations with users and management? Need to set (and document) the expectations early on.

What’s “change management”?
– “a structured approach to the change in individuals, teams, organizations and societies that enables the transition from a current state to a desired future state”
– or “getting users to come around to my way of thinking”
– … both can be helpful … you just need to know what one applies for a given organization and project.
– drive the implementation of new technology (eg, EDRMS) from a business perspective. Why are you doing this? What’s the desired outcome?

Costs and effort:
– in the UK, if the hardware and software is $1 million, there will be $3 million of change management cost.
– Eg, setting up the support processes in IT, training the records managers

Various approaches to implementation:
– (a) “it’s a black box … turn it on already”
– (b) “we need a perfect information architecture”
– (c) “let’s copy someone else’s”
– (d) “it may take us 5 years, but we will do it properly”
– (e) “what decision did we make last week – let’s change it”
– … any of these can be okay, but everyone needs to agree which one is happening.

Expect to see people going through the 5 phases of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance

Breeding success … how does the team define success? Cost savings? Risk reduction? Compliance? System use? Business improvement? Capital spent? Satisfy workers? Reduced duplication?
– you need to know this, in order to tick it off?

Biggest reason why systems fail … end user rejection. No matter how much you lock things down, they will get around it.
– Need to consult with end users … to learn from them, to hear their views, do not need to embrace everything

Opportunities and risks:
– get all your ducks in a row.
– get the money sorted.
– wave the flag. Translate the ideas of records management back to the language that end users use and the worldview in which they live.
– get your feet wet … be involved.
– go and see what’s happening in the business.

The top 5 critical success factors:
– THIS IS NOT A PROJECT!
– find the people with true commitment
– ongoing investment in change management. How do we prevent problems from happening again?
– “after action reviews” … how can we make things better?
– senior executives that will give strategy direction and then get out of the way to let the records manager get on with making the system work.

“Training is like planning: you pay for it whether you do it or not.”
– need to make it easy for them.