Effective Shared Services Change Management – Critical Success Factors

Shared services change management, despite being widely acknowledged by business practitioners as one of the significant factors that makes or breaks the transformation efforts in organizations, success continues to be elusive during most shared services implementations. Quality leadership and effective communication strategy are considered to be critical to drive successful organizational transformation as shared service deployment could involve transitions at various fronts such as organizational procedures and processes; people’s (internal and external) roles and responsibilities; culture and values; systems and structures; and finally, technology. While effective change leadership at the helm of the affairs is crucial, good managerial cadre at the middle and supportive staff at operational level are important for the overall success of the transition. Identifying key stakeholders early in the process, getting them on-board the project, evaluating their perceptions and engaging them throughout in order to manage their expectations is the most important challenge faced by the change leadership. A multi-pronged and a dynamic communication strategy identified at the start of the project not only aids in the key stakeholder buy-in early, but also in the appropriate handling of employee transitions such as employee retentions or redundancies, at a later stage of project deployment or when the project goes live. Most importantly, recording and measuring the effectiveness of the changes brought by the shared services deployment, anticipating and eliminating tricky business situations in the new scenario and introducing systems/mechanisms to identify opportunities on a continuous basis that can be actioned upon to enhance business growth, are but a few challenges and responsibilities of shared service change leadership.