Leading Change - Your Challenges?

I was involved in a business transformation project that transformed the bank to service its customers via several delivery channels including internet banking, and mobile banking. Customers need to call the bank related to any issues associated with the usage of these services. The establishment of a brand new customer contact center resulted in the introduction of new business processes, service level, problem escalation and resolutions. Managing the effect of new business processes, changes in organizational structure are the major challenges facing the project team, particularly in sourcing for call center agents with experience in banking and CRM systems. We managed to overcome these issues through continuous training and development and through the engagement of professional recruitment agencies to assist in the sourcing of the suitable candidates to support the contact center operations. Executive management support is also important to ensure any decisions made are in alignment with organizational strategy.

Hello, my organization is about 3 months away from rolling out a CRM solution. The PM that was assigned to the project is no longer with the company. I wanted ideas on how to make the change more smoother with the end users. They have been involved with the UAT thus far and design. IT has discussed the changes briefly during our town hall meetings. But I can not help but think there is more from a change perspective that can be done. The CIO has asked me to meet with him and discuss and ideas. Has anyone managed a project of this magnitude and what suggestions can you over to improve the changes that are coming? My research shows the highest rated risks with a CRM implementation are: user training and top executive level support.

This is my line of work and research. It was published by the PMI time ago.projectmanagement.com: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-pos...zational-change

One of the main issue I have faced in a few of the critically tight-scheduled projects was the stakeholders' undue involvement in the execution of the changes prior to their approval through change control procedures. In large scale projects of thousands of people working and spread across vast areas, the execution team members at times succumbs to the pressure of some of the stake holders and execute the changes at site. A huge volume of resources were spent, which can neither be accounted in the daily progress reports nor can be inspected and approved due to lack of traceability. The schedule of the subsequent activities shall be heavily impacted without any tangible and justifiable reasons. Some of the supervision would not disclose such changes until the chages are observed during inspection and validation stages, which would be too late for a correction.
Multiple stages of negotiations, non conformity reports, resource reallocations, unaccounted procurement lead time issues, QA/QC inspection and document updations, BOQ revisions etc shall be the outcome of such changes that are not processed properly.
The team had to be trained on regular basis until all are made aware of the implication of such actions. Since a number of new employees are being added on regular basis, the training and awareness sessions need to continue for months together to make the system to be realistically aligned as desired.