Crowd Sourcing For Merrier Change Management

 

This month's theme is Change Management and a related perennial problem is getting buy-in from the affected organization.  Generally, if you don't have buy-in, you get push-back. Often what is needed is a way to keep the affected parties feeling that they are involved in determining or executing the change. If affected parties are not part of the solution, they will become part of your problem.

There is a new technique to get employees more involved: "crowd-sourcing" internally .  One company used this tactic on an organizational scale and found that it was a practical way to get results. First, they used crowd-sourcing software to request cost-cutting ideas from across the organization. Workers could use screen names or use their real names as screen names. Most chose to use their real names.  More than a third of the employees participated with ideas that generated $30M in savings and no one was laid off.  How many of the still-employed workers do you think had buy-in on that activity? These results show practical value from involving the workforce via internal crowd sourcing.

You don't have to work on an organizational scale to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds. It can work in your project. Your focus must change from engaging experts to engaging everybody.

The company in the example above took advantage of special crowd sourcing software, but if you are working on a very small scale, you can be successful using any available software that allows you to collect ideas anonymously and "process" the ideas with the same participants to come up with fully-baked, prioritized solutions. The crowd -- those who are affected by the change in your project -- makes as many decisions as possible.

Here are examples of how this technique can be used on a project scale:

• Gather and prioritize business requirements or upgrade features from users, accounting/finance, salespeople , marketing and anyone else who is even indirectly affected
• Identify likely project risks and determine their severity by engaging the entire project workforce, stakeholders, those experienced with organizational history and others who are willing to participate
• Once you identify a list of likely project risks and their severity, keep the analysis going by having the crowd identify effective mitigations

You can think of other uses appropriate to your projects, but make sure you keep pushing the boundary of those who you ask to participate. The more the merrier.