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Having metrics to quantify the progress of a digital transformation and guide the project in the right direction is foundational to contemporary project management. But even with skilled business leaders using the industry-standard change management metrics, today’s tech implementations have a way of not working out.
The reason for this is that the most important metric for gauging the success of a tech implementation is brand new. Few are aware of it, but it’s on the way to transforming change management, boosting transformation success to a level never before attainable.
That metric is Execution Intelligence (XQ). It is the product of advanced behavioral analytics, and it makes all the other methods of assessing sentiment within an organization look like vague, un-actionable approximations. It’s the metric change management has been missing. Here’s why you need it.
Imagine you’ve launched an enterprise-wide tech implementation. The entire company has been deeply engaged, with monthly and weekly check-ins. Teams are hitting deadlines, turning around deliverables, and getting appropriately trained on new solutions. At every step, your metrics are telling you that you’re on target, for instance:
Dig a little deeper. Those teams that underwent training reported they were useful because they felt obligated to. In reality, they weren’t absorbing the material; they weren’t interested, and were hoping they’d never have to actually touch the new tools in their course of the work.
Meanwhile over in the seemingly satisfied departments, people have undergone difficult-to-detect shifts in sentiment. Those expressing contentment with the new tools last week, have actually been using a combination of old and new ones. In the project’s next wave, they’re poised to turn on a dime and go fully negative on the transformation.
And as for the positive survey responses, the office scuttlebutt paints a different picture. It’s filled with different strains of dissatisfaction that aren’t captured when employees, or even managers, are asked directly for their opinion.
Metrics you’re watching and measuring have been giving the superficial impression of an implementation primed for success. But the reality on the ground is very different; it’s more like a managerial minefield that’s likely to not get off the ground. Because your data is based largely on what employees and teams are telling you, not what they’re thinking or, at a granular level, what they’re actually doing.
With XQ, Guidewise’s groundbreaking new metric, you get the real story.
It’s no secret that the employee sentiment, office politics, and other internal dynamics impact, slow, and often thwart tech implementations. But the methods for gathering data about these dynamics, and the methodologies for understanding and navigating them have, until now, not been robust enough to matter much. It has made change management akin to trying to navigate a complex, construction-heavy driving route with an outdated, inaccurate paper map in a world that needs GPS.
With XQ, data about behavior and sentiment is collected and analyzed through machine learning and a proprietary adaptation engine, giving you a map of your company’s sentiment far more robust and revealing than notoriously biased sources like survey responses (or other newer but still woefully inadequate methods).
Instead of getting an incomplete, general, perhaps overly rosy, picture of employee sentiment, you’ll have an accurate view of what the sentiment really is, and how it’s changing in real time.
So what can you do with XQ?
Tracking the real-time development of sentiment lets your savvy, active, emotionally intelligent leadership detect and address any shift in how employees feel; not just to correct course, but to find creative ways to inspire and support productivity while diffusing and staving off sentiment that works against your eventual goal. With Guidewise’s XQ platform, leadership can view this data in easily understood charts and graphs, using its insights to inform their approach to specific teams, and even individuals, every day.
Consider, for example, trainings. They can be a little boilerplate, and even those that are thoughtfully customized don’t take into account employee emotions or state of mind. But with XQ, you can see where a given team is at, and craft trainings that speak to their state of mind, good and bad, about using the new technology.
That’s only one example, but creative leadership methods that guide projects based on authentic up-to-the-minute employee sentiment is what digital transformations need in order to succeed.
The truth is, in recent years, tech implementations have tended to fail, because XQ did not yet exist to guide success.
But that has changed. With XQ, business change management and organizational change management no longer rest on reactive responses. XQ creates a real-time, ever-changing behavioral map that allows strategy to happen in a way never before possible.
And with more change on the way, the business world needs XQ more than ever
The advent of artificial intelligence means enterprise technology is facing a tsunami of change. To remain competitive, businesses across the board are going to need to implement AI tools that will likely raise a lot of questions, concerns, and complex emotional reactions from staff.
This means more potential choke-points and more hidden hurdles, even as the success of the implementation will be synonymous with the ability of the business to thrive. XQ is the only way companies can hope to overcome this challenge.
So if you’re planning a digital transformation and want to avoid using outdated, ineffective business change management methods that won’t get you where you need to be, book a free Execution Intelligence consultation with Guidewise. We’re happy to discuss how you can take advantage of the metrics you need to make technological transformation happen, seamlessly and successfully.
