Service Management Leadership - OCM

There are certain things that we learn in our daily jobs roles. This is especially true for me in consulting. I have these expectations, these assumptions that get dashed very often, very frequently, and I'm surprised. Let me tell you about two. I expect everybody to understand what OCM is. And if you're a leader, you'll chuckle because most organizations really struggle in this. That's number one. Number two is that organizations, while they think that OCM is a good idea, that they will fund it, both of those assumptions, expectations are flawed and they're pretty much false. So let's unpack this. We in the world of technology see technology projects as a technology thing going live. We do not understand, we do not have the perspective of our users where they see a technology project going live and they're like, how does this impact me? How is this going to impact my ability to do my job well? That's what they care about, right? And so we must put on that viewpoint, those glasses to see that. And let's take that a step further. The goal of technology implementations should be to help those people do their jobs better. So wouldn't it make sense? Wouldn't it be logical if we helped them adopt our new technology easily and quickly? Wouldn't that be logical? However, we don't fund it. We don't, we think, oh, everybody knows about ocm. Everybody knows this. I have seen organizations struggle, like many calls the service desk when they did not have ocm. This is a few years ago. And so you'll understand the reference in their on premise, Microsoft 365 went to Office 365. So the buttons were in a different place. Same Microsoft Word, Excel, but the buttons were different. People lost their minds, they did not know what to think. I've also seen these with ServiceNow upgrades. You know the ones, twice a year the buttons move. There are certain things that change. We have to help our users adopt. We have to help them do their job better. So let's talk about tactical ways to do so. First, you must fund it. It must be a priority. That's easy, right? It's not. Because we as technology leaders, we want to fund technical, know how technical expertise, more tools, more integrations. But it's worthless if people don't adopt. Isn't that correct? Let's talk about practical tactical ways. First of all, you can break down your big user base into Personas. So Personas are just how people interact with your new technology. You can put them in different buckets, maybe on how they each use your new technology. Maybe even like how senior they are, then what we want to do with these Personas. So we have these manageable buckets or groups. Then we can then look at how do we communicate with each one? What types of training does each one need? What frequency of communications and training do each need? How do we follow up with each Persona, each group? How do we bring them along with us? Our goal should be it must be adoption. So I implore you as a leader, invest in ocm. I have been asked to lead projects from an OCM point of view and I kind of enjoy it because I kind of enjoy saying what will your users think? What will your customers think when this goes live? Have we equipped them to be successful? And if the answer is I don't know or no, then we must do a better job. We see this often, right? You all see it in your organization. I see it in the ones that I help. How do we help them through this new technology do their jobs better? That's the purpose of these new technical capabilities. They're not just to be shiny things in a data center. It's to help people do their jobs better. My name is Jeffrey Tefertiller and I thank you for being a part of what we do at Service Management Leadership. Please, like share, subscribe wherever you are listening or watching. Help me get the word out for this and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know how I can be helpful to your organization, even if it's leading OCM for a project or a program. Have an awesome rest of your day. Bye.