Recommendations for organizational change management

Implementation and adoption of mixed reality (MR) in organizations requires strong orchestrating efforts. New hardware, new software, and new ways of working must be addressed, managed, and governed through controlled processes and well-executed organizational change management.

Organizational change management is an important part of your implementation process, because it helps ensure that Dynamics 365 Guides is effectively adopted and integrated into your organization. If your operators don't take advantage of guides for training and job instruction during their daily work at production sites, HoloLens and Guides won't provide any organizational benefits, even if they are technically implemented in an industry-compliant way.

To foster organizational adoption and ensure buy-in from departments, managers, training consultants, operators, and others, we recommend the following four activities, which are inspired by Prosci's ADKAR® model:

1. Formulate a change vision.

   Prepare a statement that clearly describes the purpose of implementing Guides and the desired state that you plan to steer your organization to. This statement is called a change vision. At a strategic level, a change vision helps ensure that the purpose of your Guides implementation is aligned with your company's overall strategy and future goals.

   Here is a generic example of a change vision:

   We use Guides to enhance the quality and efficiency of operator training while maintaining strict compliance with industry regulations, empowering our workforce to continuously improve their skills and contribute to the success of the organization.

   We recommend that you facilitate a series of workshops to involve representatives from different organizational stakeholder groups in the process of creating a change vision. When different stakeholder perspectives are incorporated, your change vision naturally becomes more well-rounded. In addition, by involving stakeholders in the process, you increase the likelihood that they are invested in the vision, support it, and take accountability for their part in making it a reality.

2. Assess site or area maturity.

   When you implement Guides, it's important that you assess whether the production site or area in question is ready for rollout. For this purpose, we recommend that you complete these tasks, among others:

   • Establish a use case selection process to ensure that the relevant training and job instruction processes are appropriate to support via Guides.

     Tip

     Processes are usually relevant if they are complex (for example, because they involve multiple steps), rare (and therefore hard to remember), difficult (because they tend to cause deviations), and prone to frequent onboarding of new operators (for example, because of high staff turnover).

   • Make a list of local requirements that are needed for successful Guides adoption. These requirements include (but aren't limited) management approval, allocated resources for adoption, finalized role distribution (for example, who will be authors), and site acceptance of a planned adoption timeline.

3. Prepare for onboarding of areas/sites, and onboard them.

   To help prepare for the actual onboarding when one or more sites or areas are considered mature enough for Guides adoption:

   • Map and analyze stakeholders to identify potential roadblocks.
   • Assess the level of support or resistance to the adoption process.
   • Tailor communication and engagement strategies to meet the needs of the specific stakeholder group.

   When you onboard sites:

   • Use a similar onboarding plan across areas/sites. The plan should have a clear division of responsibility and roles to ensure coherent and adequate onboarding.
   • Equip areas/sites with adoption and training "packages" that consist of, for example, Guides instructions for users (role-based), scripts and templates for workshops/meetings/emails for the local project team, and executive summaries for local management.
   • Ensure standardized Guides training that is continuously updated based on learnings and improvements across all sites.
   • Define and deploy a "train the trainer" concept to scale the standardized Guides training through local "ambassadors." An important success criterion here is the empowerment of frontline workers. Are they capable of authoring and operating guides because of the training?

4. Sustain adoption, and secure benefit realization.

   To help ensure the continued success of the Guides software as it's rolled out to areas and sites:

   • Create a process for rolling out changes such as new software features.
   • Develop area and site key performance indicators (KPIs) to track the performance of Guides.
   • Regularly distribute user satisfaction surveys, and incorporate or respond to the feedback that is given.