“Did we just become best friends?” – When OCM Meets UX
“Through your varied work experience, which team contributed most to your organizational change management skills?” The question came from a bright-eyed, twenty-something year-old and was directed at Cheryl Badger, an organizational change manager with 20+ years of experience. Without question, Cheryl replied that working with the User Experience (UX) team provided the steepest learning curve and complimented her OCM skills most. UX focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and their limitations. Cheryl helped us understand more about UX and why change management professionals should jump at an opportunity to partner with them.
What is User Experience (UX)?
The purpose of the User Experience (UX) team is to design and improve the user experience of a product or service. UX teams include experts that research, design, and help test products and services for digital systems such as kiosks, mobile, and personal computers.
Benefits of OCM partnering with UX
OCM can leverage work completed by UX. UX creates a powerful tool called personas that help them explain the end user experience as well as create effective designs. Personas are representations of user groups that UX uses to test design concepts, create user-centered designs, and more. OCMers can leverage the personas for the stakeholder assessment and impact assessment—the basis of change management and communication plans!
Sharing UX data with training and OCM teams saves time and money. UX collects foundational data about the user experience that training and OCM can leverage to create their respective plans. Sharing this data amongst the teams means less duplicative efforts and therefore, less money spent.
It allows for a more cohesive end user experience. When UX, training, and change management teams partner, it makes for a more cohesive end user experience. This means that end users experience consistent verbiage beginning with awareness communications from OCM, to end user training, to using the new product or service.
UX data can help demonstrate the value of change management. Because UX is a data-centric practice that collects data from end user testing before and after OCM efforts, OCM can use this data to demonstrate the value of change management—a HUGE win for OCM!
Pain points documented by UX can contribute to communication plans. UX highlights pain points for each user group through journey maps, visuals that show the path that an end user takes from start to finish. OCM can take note of these pain points to tailor communication plans to have effective communication strategies.
UX data can highlight resistors or advocates for change. Since journey maps highlight where end users are likely to have a difficult time, this data can help change management practitioners identify resistors and advocates for change. This UX data can also be used to set expectations with users about what they may like and dislike about the change. (Pro tip: Advocates for change usually make the best Change Network members who help their team members adopt changes!)
UX and OCM are different disciplines with a similar goal: improve the end user experience. While a UX team may not exist at every company, when it does, change management consultants should make a point to set up touchpoints between training, UX, and OCM to create a consolidated people readiness plan. The overlap between these disciplines means that that all three teams, as well as end users, will benefit when a partnership exists.
Contact ChangeStaffing to learn more about leveraging UX to complement your next change initiative!
A very special thank you to Cheryl Badger for her thought leadership and for collaborating with us on this blog.
Written by Kylette Harrison