A Trojan Horse for Change

After 20+ years of utilizing their homegrown customer relationship management (CRM) system, a prestigious U.S. university and its eponymous healthcare system were making the move to Salesforce. They’d worked with a consulting firm to assess the organization’s change readiness, but lacked an actionable change strategy to address the complexities of implementing a modern solution in their decentralized organization. Additionally, having talked about the CRM move for years with little progress, the workforce was skeptical of the institution’s ability to follow through on the promised change.

As the lead change consultant on the project, I worked in step with the institution’s Project Management Office, bringing leaders together to align on change outcomes and break those down into achievable, time-bound goals and objectives. To neutralize skeptics’ doubts and build excitement for the new system, I led the development and execution of a communications and stakeholder engagement plan that kept business owners, change champions, and key leaders (aka “influencers”) in the spotlight addressing questions and concerns about the change in meaningful ways for their respective teams. As part of the change strategy, I worked with the institution’s talent management and human resources team to design opportunities for the workforce to improve their data literacy and build new reporting skills deemed essential for conducting their work in a modern CRM.

While the scope of the change strategy did not include an explicit goal of culture change, the institution was eager to leverage the CRM implementation to begin building a “culture of innovation” and change agility. In other words, the project was a trojan horse for organizational change. This desire informed the longtail of the project’s change curve. Building from the momentum of having successfully made the CRM move – the institution’s biggest transformation in over 20 years – I worked with leaders to chart a roadmap for the immediate future that integrated the project’s supporting structures into new ways of working, communicating, and innovating, ultimately helping them bypass institutional inertia to pave the way for their next innovation challenge.