Change network supports healthcare system's new Oracle HCM system go-live

Client background

The organization is a public academic health science center whose entities include hospitals, clinics, teaching facilities and a research center.

The business challenge

The organization was looking to adopt a modern human capital management (HCM) system to replace their current 20-year-old fragmented system and had engaged Baker Tilly, in collaboration with a prime contractor, to jointly migrate its human resource system to Oracle HCM Cloud to support planned growth and future challenges. The new enterprise solution was the first of many IT modernization initiatives planned in support of the five-year strategic vision.

Looking beyond the immediate benefits a modernized system would bring, the organization capitalized on the opportunity to reengineer their HCM processes including the way they were going to recruit, train and manage performance going forward. With these incoming changes, the organization realized a need to clearly articulate the process changes that were going to be experienced across their organization as a result of the new technology.

The communication work for the new HCM solution was led by the organization’s internal change team with support from Baker Tilly's Organizational Readiness team, however they found that developing a strong value proposition to drive support and buy-in for both the new technology as well as their reformed processes would be best supported by a dependency to the higher-level strategic priority. The organization further engaged Baker Tilly's Organizational Readiness team to construct an overarching and integrated messaging framework and execution plan designed to build strategic alignment between the system and process changes for this initiative and their organizational goals.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly worked with the organization’s change team to identify a change network that would be essential in driving support for this strategic-level initiative and setting the stage for the upcoming digital transformation initiatives. We began by interviewing senior leadership responsible for the success of this project as well as business leaders across each of their four entities (hospital, clinic, teaching and research) to assess the existing support and level of effort that would be required to adapt to the new HCM processes.

Through this risk and readiness assessment we were able to engage key stakeholders in the development of impactful messaging that would foster support of the incoming changes and equip leadership with the tools needed to educate staff and begin to socialize the value proposition downstream. Because each entity has a different mission specific to the work they do, we further tailored the messaging to connect their unique perspectives to the strategic vision and goals so that employees across the organization would understand why the change was necessary and have a clear motivation for why they should care and support the new system and processes.

In addition to constructing the messaging, we developed talking points, toolkits and a communication plan, outlining the steps required to build awareness and rally support for a unified and consistent HCM system across the organization. This plan empowered leadership to work as change agents to generate support for the change. As a result, the organization was equipped with the tools to drive the change forward during the system go-live and laid the foundation to cultivate support for the upcoming digital transformation initiatives.