Service CollABorative March 2025 - Change Management with Markus Basse, Alfa Laval

IFS Service CollABorative: Think Tank - Change Management with Markus Basse, Alfa Laval

Date of Meeting: 19 March 2025 10:00 AM US Eastern Standard Time

A Conversation between Sarah and Markus:

• [Sarah] This is a topic that we've talked about before and I'm sure we will talk about many times again because it is always important and it continues to be an area that presents a lot of challenges for folks. And as we all evolve in how we tackle this, it's great to come back together and talk about what's working, how are the challenges changing as the workforce changes, or the way we deliver service changes, and all of those things.
• We're going to take this in two parts. I have a guest speaker who's going to share a bit of his story around this topic with everyone, and we're going to do that in a Q&A format. And then we'll open it up for discussion. I didn't prepare slides, but I prepared myself some notes of things that have come up in recent discussions or interviews that I think are just worth mentioning and sharing with the group and getting everyone's opinions on.
• That's the game plan for today. If you have questions as we go, feel free to raise your hand, chime in, it doesn't have to be formal. You can do that however you would like.
• I'm thrilled to introduce Marcus Basse, who is the product owner of one service at Alfa Laval. Marcus and I had an opportunity to present together last fall at Field Service Europe and in that session we were talking about a number of different things, but what stood out to me is Marcus had shared that the project that we were doing that session on, you had gotten feedback from your CEO that it was the smoothest or one of the smoothest implementations in the company's history. And so, I said, well, why is that? And we talked about some of the ways that you and the teams navigated the change that helped really smooth out some of those road bumps that can come up along the way. So, I've asked Marcus to share those with you all. So, we'll do that, and then we can have some open discussion. So, Marcus, before we talked about the change management piece just so everyone is on the same page. Can you talk about what the one service initiative is at Alfa Laval?
• [Markus] Hi everybody. My name is Marcus. I'm the product owner. I sat in Alfa Laval for one service, located in Lund in southern Sweden and our team is spread over the world. We've got colleagues in Sweden, but also in the Netherlands and Germany and in India and Sri Lanka. So, it's quite a spread team. We have focused for the first part on the field service side. We have around 1000 users right now working with the field service plus coordinators managers up to 1200. And the second step will be on the service centre part, where basically the equipment comes to us.
• We had a quite tight roll out plan which was actually given when I joined the team and there was not much room of negotiation. So we had the pilot here with Canada in January, where we had some time to fix things and then we had also another pilot with another ERP. We have three different ERP systems in place globally. M3, iScala and D365. No integration is also possible. And then after the pilot we were basically on boarding sales company after sales company at a quite high pace.
• Before that, already months ago we had the change sessions physically with all the sales companies. And went through the process and spoke about expectations and also which changes on a local process side must be done. Because now, 3-4 months later after Amsterdam, we see more and more what the difficulties are. It's not necessarily the system. The IT solution itself is fine, but it's about the local processes. Sometimes it's also when people get irritated, like, OK, the system is not doing what I want and it's not working as intended, but hang on, are you sure you should work as you did the last 30 years?
• [Sarah] That's where it gets complicated. The one service initiative at Alfa Laval, the goal of that was not only to replace some out dated technology and streamline that part, but also to review those processes and create a more consistent, cohesive way of working across the organisation. And of course we know that that's where a lot of these challenges can come up. Sometimes it is the technology. Often it isn't necessarily the technology, it's what's changing around the implementation of that technology that people have challenges with. So, Marcus, a couple bits I wanted to talk about that we touched on when we talked through what helped things go as smoothly as they did. The first is just that you knew going into it that change management was going to be very, very important. So, you had that mindset and I bring that up not because there's necessarily a lot to say around understanding that importance, but basically to point out that in the conversations I have with people where things ultimately go wrong, it's not that they didn't ever know it was going to be important. It's that they knew it, but they still rushed through it or deprioritized it, or cut the budget for it anyway. And so just knowing that it isn't worth cutting corners there, I think is worth mentioning. We have this broken out into pre roll out, during roll out, and post roll out. So, can you talk a little bit about what you guys did pre roll out to help set the stage for what was coming and get ahead of this as much as you could.
• [Markus] Together with the local contact, we have a cluster PM which is responsible for the cluster, the project manager but also local contact and together with them we checked OK what is the current state? Which process are there, how are they working today. And then also matching or comparing with the new way of working. Where's the gap? And then tackling the gaps.
• [Sarah] You said that you were going ahead before the roll out would begin to talk through what's happening. To let people ask questions to hear what people have to say. What did that process look like?
• [Markus] It's two or three steps. Firstly we had a meet and greet at a high level. Who are we, what do we want. And then also what is the idea. We always said from the beginning we want to implement a new way of working, a new process. We didn't necessarily speak about the software.  We were not selling an IT system, it's more like a new way of working. And then we also arranged training sessions from super user sessions, and also further sessions with non-super users. Well planned in advance that they are still able to play around in pre prod as well. And then shortly before there was like a last wrap up. Any questions, anything you're wondering. And then we started with the rollout itself. We had a four-week hyper care per sales company. Depending on the need and what the sales company wanted, we had some sales companies that wanted a call every day. Some wanted two calls a week Monday and Thursday to catch up. What are the issues? What are the questions and so on. We had our huge list and went through it and killed all the questions or problems, et cetera ASAP.
• [Sarah] So when you got to the roll out at each location, what did you do in person as you were going live, and what was the balance between your team, the local project managers and then the Super users?
• [Markus] The local team and I include a super user here, you could see per sales company which went well and which was not so well from the strength of the local team. Everything fell and did not fell with the local team. It's about the engagement and the motivation there. We are located in Sweden, but for example when we are speaking with people thousand kilometre away, we cannot look on their fingers how they follow the processes in detail. So we are highly dependent on the local ones that they are also on it to keep the processes and also to handle the needs of the of the people locally.
• [Sarah] And then the hyper care phase. Afterward, I think is a really good point, because sometimes you get through, go live and then you think like, OK, we can move on to the next bit. How did that work between the way your team was providing support like the calls and the local team and that sort of thing?
• [Markus] We arranged already before they go live which how the hyper care would look like. What the expectations are what we can give, what we cannot give.  And also then after the hyper care in the last week we had like a handshake, we looked deep in each other's eyes. So like ok, are we in a good position to close the hyper care? And also with that said, we also said always from day one even though it's not hyper care we will not drop you. But of course, if we have let's say 2 bugs in place and one is for hyper care is one is not, the hyper care will be prioritised. When you are in hyper care you're the lucky one which has this benefit. But of course, if another sales company's hyper care, you may not.
• [Sarah] So those calls that you had during hyper care on Mondays and Thursdays, it was your team that was running those calls and all of the different regions or sites that were going live could plug into those? Or was that done by area?
• [Markus] We had calls per sales company and it was actually mainly me in this call. I was I was running the calls, 50% of the questions I could answer directly. The other 50% I had to take with me and followed up. When I got them on Monday the expectation was to have an answer on Thursday or earlier. So, it was a tough period.
• [Sarah] So the feedback that you got from the CEO on how smoothly this process all went compared to some others, what do you think are the biggest things that you got right?
• [Markus] We spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of travelling hours to catch up with the people to get this change of implementation in place, but also that's what the sales companies told us afterwards. That we took care of them. Everybody who wasn't a hyper care knows it's not the nicest thing to have, maybe 5 people in front of you and they are all tackling you with things or partly threatening you with that they will send an e-mail to my boss and so on. So, it's a tough, stressful situation. But at the end of the day, they felt taken care. And they felt listened. I think that was the key. Because also the sales companies have different experiences with the group digital in our company. So, they were sceptical and then they said, yeah, you really kept your word.
• [Sarah] What do you think looking back, are the lessons learned? Where do you think you could have done better or what would you do differently if you were doing the process again?
• [Markus] We had partly in Field Service side 9 sales companies and hyper care the same time. Which was working, but it was not very nice. And what we will do now is that we have 3 sales companies or three service centres in parallel only and not 9 as we had on the peak and for Field Service. Which also of course means that we will stretch out the roll out plan over almost one and half to  two years because we have around 75 service centres locally. For the field service part, it was probably easier than for the service centre because the field service people they are used to speaking English due to English speaking customers, but in the service centre we will not have that because they don't have any contact with the customer. It will be a different story and also most likely a little bit more complex because the service centres they also have their way of working their processes. When you ask 3 people at our company, you will get 4 answers and it's tough to align all the service centres into one flow.
• [Sarah] This'll tie into one of the points I wanted to bring up from some recent conversations, but your super users that you relied on to help spread knowledge, create that enthusiasm you talked about, et cetera. How did you find those people? How did you identify who they would be in each location?
• [Markus] Often, good people are also getting asked to get even more tasks. Sometimes we had super users for other systems where we know they are reliable, they are well trained in IT and they also like to develop. So they could be the right catch. For a few sales companies, depending on the size, they had their own person for that. China, for example, India. The sales companies are huge. Same with the US as well. There's also huge for us, so here we had dedicated people who could take care of that. And for smaller sales companies, it may have been the manager, but it's not very likely, so more like coordinators, team managers, which have an overview about the crowd.

Sarah’s Insights and Customer Feedback:

• [Sarah] I'm going to go through my notes. These aren't necessarily in any particular order, but I'll talk through them and then we can see what we want to focus on or discuss as a group.
• The reason I asked Marcus that question about the Super users is, I just had a gentleman on the podcast recently. He was in internal communications for a long time. He led that for Newell Brands, which is a huge company that owns a lot of different subsidiary brands. And now he does different consulting work. He actually has a podcast. And when we talk about change management, we always talk about communication and the importance of communication, clear communication, multi-channel communication, two-way communication. He brought up in our discussion the three eyes of communication. Inform, Involve and Inspire. I like that because I think often, we tend to put a lot of emphasis on inform and sometimes little to none on involve or inspire, and I think it's just a really good reminder to make sure that we're thinking about all three of those things. We know that in projects like this, involvement helps a lot, involving people early on, getting their feedback early on, making them feel part of the process. But I think the Inspire piece is worth considering as well.
• The other thing that he brought up is the idea of more effectively leveraging internal influencers. He shared a statistic that he said in most organisations about 12% of the workforce is what we would consider to be leaders and they can only directly influence 50% of the rest of the employees. Internal influences are typically 3% of the workforce, but can directly influence 90%. I'm not saying that a super user and an internal influencer are necessarily the same thing. They could be. They could maybe be different. But I think him giving that statistic really made me stop to think about all of the missed opportunities there might be to find and leverage these internal influencers. That's why I asked you how you found them. He talked about how these are the people that everyone goes to for the meeting after the meeting. He said, as soon as the meeting breaks, they run and say, Oh my God, what did you think about this? or whatever. And we had a whole conversation around this because I said, you don't want it to feel like you're paying them off to be a company puppet. That's not going to have the effect you want it to have. But how can you create good, more organic relationships?  Not to get them to regurgitate a company dialogue. But to help them truly understand the why behind the change and then in their own way, in their own manner, help spread that word. Because if they can do that organically, it's going to have a much bigger impact. And I think that there's a lot of potential to what he's saying.
• [Markus] In the beginning, pre roll out and roll out, there was a lot of soft components like training, training, training and awareness. But what we're also doing now is a little bit more to the hard facts. KPIs. We have a set of around 30-40 KPIs where we follow up on the sales companies. Are they really using the system, because we get the data from the system, but you also see the system differences. For example, you see the duration, or you see the service type. When you have 40% troubleshooting in the average is maybe eight, maybe there's something wrong, or you see the average travelling time stuff like that. Which we also used for targets of the coordinators managers.
• [Sarah] Watching those things and looking proactively for those opportunities of where something could be off, where could someone need more training, where could someone need more attention is really important. I wanted to talk about the three eyes of communication and then the internal influencers. I just think to me, there's such an opportunity there to think about that piece a little bit differently.
• The other thing to your point about KPIs is the idea of rewarding effort, not just outcome. I think sometimes when we're going through a change of any sort, an initiative where there's a quote finish line. And ultimately there isn't. There is talk all the time about continual improvement. So, there's no real finish line. But when we're in a project like what you're talking about, there is a go live, there is a moment like you said, we look deep into each other's eyes. We make sure everyone's good and we move on. But a lot of times, the people that aren't necessarily bought in or aren't super comfortable with the change, I think there can be a lot of benefit in looking for the opportunities to not just track the metrics of are they complying, are they doing the ultimate end goal of what we want them to do? But how can we track and encourage and reward effort. Just trying something new. Being more engaged, asking more questions, giving more feedback. Whatever it is that's going to bring them along, the people that are a little bit more resistant, I think that's another good tip.
• And then I had a conversation this week and we were talking about a lot of different things that were interesting, but one of the points that came up that I thought was worth mentioning in this session is, we talk a lot about giving people the opportunity to provide feedback and making them feel part of the process. But I think if we're being honest with ourselves, sometimes that's done as more of a mirage than a real, genuine interest in what they have to say. Sometimes I think it's, you might be listening to an extent, but you're not completely listening. And I think the opportunity here is to not just welcome people's feedback, but really value it and really get ahead of knowing that these people are the ones in the trenches. They have a wealth of knowledge and if you can involve them early enough in the process, that you actually have an opportunity to incorporate some of their feedback. It can have the potential to make the overall project a lot more successful. I think sometimes we do it as a yeah, we hear you. Yeah, sure. Instead of really wanting that perspective and there can be a difference there.
• And the other thing that I really liked is really, truly encouraging people to question the status quo. And really encouraging people to push each other. And I think that that is not done a lot in organisations. We are very programmed to want people that nod and smile and just do what we're asking them to do. And people that don't do that are seen as difficult. I say that from first-hand experience. If we can get to a point where people feel that they really can push back, not only can that input be valuable, but that culture is what helps people feel bought in, engaged and have a sense of ownership. They feel like you really want them to be part of something.
• The other thing I talked about on the Podcast is he was told when their company went through its most recent IFS roll out that someone anecdotally said to him, 50% of your field technicians are going to quit, because they don't want this change. And he said OK. If they do, they do. And his point was, the company must evolve. You may get to a point where attrition is a very real risk of some of these changes because you might find that there are people that just really do not want to do things differently. They do not want to change the way they've been working. Now I think he said they have 500 or so technicians and they had 2 quit. So nowhere near 50%. That was a very inflated risk. But his point was, you do need to think about that in advance. And in his opinion, you have to be willing to accept that risk because acquiescing to anyone's resistance to change is not going to keep the organisation on pace with where it needs to go. And I just thought that was a really good point because it's probably something that comes up a lot, but that doesn't necessarily come up in these conversations in terms of how we're planning for that or how we're navigating those conversations, et cetera.
• [Customer 1] One of the things about KPIs and listening to people and taking on board is brilliant. Very, very important. People need to be heard and you've got to move forward. But one thing that I think when you are going through a big project, is that you have to be consistent with the success criteria and what you're aiming for. Because if during the project you start taking on too many messages and too many ideas from people, that can get diluted if you're not careful and you end up losing pace of where you are on a change. And then people think that they've lost control, and people think they've gained control, and people think they're losing control. People think they want to leave, people get unhappy. So, you need to define at the start what your success is and what your version of what you're going for. And it and it could be the system implemented on a certain date with this, this and this, but there should also be a almost like a mission statement, success criteria, which is are people comfortable with the system, that sort of thing. And you have to remind yourself of that. And so when people say, oh, we've got this great idea, does it align with that mission statement? If it doesn't, then it's a day two thing perhaps. And it's like, right, that’s the continuous improvement. That's for later because you'll never get change done otherwise. You'll get diverted by other ideas and stuff. But you've got to keep aligning with that mission statement of where you think success is for your project. Anything new to that, that's your continuous improvement.
• [Sarah] It's a great point. There’re a couple things that came to mind as you're saying that. One is how these things happen in phases. So, the first phase of whatever the project's going to be is creating that, what are we trying to do. So, you have control over how much input do you welcome in at that phase. You're not going to welcome everyone's. You may welcome no one's. It depends on what the initiative is. But that could be an opportunity where there's a set of key stakeholders that have developed this mission statement together. Now here is what we have set out to do, period. We're now in the phase where we can welcome some input on how we get there, or what matters most, et cetera. So that was one thought, but the other thought, is it is a very important point, and I think the other consideration needs to be using that mission statement and success criteria to create boundaries for how you will manage conflict. Because if you welcome feedback and then to your point, you can't let it get you off track. You need to have those boundaries. But using that mission statement to say I hear you; your input is valid. I'm not able to address it right now because this is what we're focused on. So, let's put it on this list and after we accomplish our initial objectives and we've reached our success criteria, I'm happy to come back and have a conversation about this, but right now, we're focused on these things. It removes some of the, to your point, politics of it, of well, you listen to Bob, why aren't you listening to Sarah?
• [Customer 1] Absolutely. What you just said there, that's a really valid point. It focuses people. This this isn't a personal thing. It's not you're better than him, it's not the goal of the project is this. And your comment taken into that, he's fitted perfectly into the goal, great. Yours is slightly off centre. Fantastic. Let's put it to day two and consider it then. I hadn't thought about the conflict thing, but it's really cool.
• [Sarah] And even as you're going through the process in these different phases of asking for feedback, being up front as you're doing so in saying, listen, we value everyone's perspective, we welcome anyone's feedback, but in no way are we telling you one, it can all be incorporated or two, we can address it all in a certain time frame. We want to hear what you have to say. I also think it's great if it's realistic to say, we will acknowledge what you've said. That's the other thing is, when you ask for feedback, people give feedback and then they have no idea if anyone read it, heard it, considered it, or if it just fell into the abyss. It's a great way to get people to not do it anymore. So, if you can acknowledge it but say, hey, this is great, we're incorporating it. Hey, this is great, but this doesn't fit where we are with our success criteria right now. I'm going to put it on a list to come back to. Hey, this is great, but it doesn't seem realistic for where we are as a business. Whatever it is I think, setting the stage up front that, not taking the feedback doesn't mean it's not good feedback or we don't care about you. It just means that we can't possibly address everything at once.
• [Customer 2] I'm just sharing an experience more so than offering a resolution, but I'd love to feedback from the broader team on this. We're in a constant state of flux. We launched an application in the warehouse, we call it Scantrack and we're really trying to make things more efficient using OCR for serial scanning instead of people typing things in. Not everything has a barcode. What we find a lot and not just on the Scantrack application is that initial excitement's pretty high. If we can get initial excitement again, change is scary. People are people. So, we launch an application, we get some adoption, but we see it tethered down really quickly. People's excitement starts high. People using an application we adopted into the processes, people find that it wasn't exactly what they were expecting. Maybe there are some complications, maybe there are some difficulties. They feel my old process and where I did everything manual was faster. Granted, it's not at all sustainable or scalable to the organisation, but they were already familiar with it. They can easily fall back on that and they often do fall back. And there's been situations where we look at our data, the KPIs. You go from initial hyper care into KPIs and you know what people are doing, and it drops to 0%. Do you see that they haven't logged into the application for two weeks and they've gone completely back to their manual process without letting anyone in upper management know at least. Somebody may have known, but we didn't.
• A lot of the excuses or the reasoning that we get from the people is, we found that this one-off process couldn't be completed in this technology. We found that this was more complicated there. And there's always a reason. We find that unless we can deliver 100%, we can account for every single situation, every single occurrence. People will find an excuse and the challenge that we face internally is that those excuses are tolerated. In a normal environment, and this is where again, I can come up to any assumption that I have, but I'd love the feedback. Personally, I would say look, guys, it's 90% there, use it for the 90% where it does work, and do the other 10% manual as you used to with proper exception reporting for it as we work on solidifying the solution. But keep using it. Keep using it. Don't give them an out.
• I find that often they do get accepted for the out because the feedback is that it's so complicated, even though we can't really seem to prove that. It is in many cases; the excuse gets accepted.
• How do you all deal with that? How do you make sure that when the users are so set to not using a new application, even though it has significant downstream benefits to the organisation. I understand that you got to share those benefits with them, that's just standard communication change management. But there's some people just not changing their ways. We found that in PSO. But yeah, it's just adoption is challenging for us, it really is.
• [Markus] I I have one specific case in mind in our sales company in the Nordics and I would say we silenced him with love, because he was totally against it. He was very negative all the time. Unfortunately, it was a field service manager which makes it even worse, because he should be a promoter and he's not. We were talking with him, taking him by the hand. What are the issues? What? What? What? What? We also wrote everything down and tried to solve all his problems. And at the end of the day, we were able to turn him. Probably about nine months ago, he was the grumpy cat in the corner, and now he's a promoter. Of course, it doesn't work with everyone, but at least here there there's a success story. And we also said like if there is something, and again here, it's about trust, if there is something give me a call before you get grumpy in the corner. Give me a call and we try to fix it. And luckily, I also had a developer from our teams located in the same location. So, when there was something, I took the phone. Can you please go to him now. He wants this and that. And they're like this guy really. Yeah, we take care of you. But of course it's not working for everybody. But a few key persons, which you really need to change, you must go to extra mile there.
• [Customer 2] And what we face budget too, because if they come back and say I need these things changed, usually that's a change order for us. And then it needs to be reprioritized, then needs to be done. We don't always have endless budget to keep tweaking, keep tweaking, keep tweaking and go from there. So, there may be delays in that I think furthers the dissatisfaction in general.
• [Customer 3] I think we've all experienced that quite a lot because when you go in with something, you are always over promising a little. You also you must believe in things and there are always unforeseen problems and of course people face that it's not exactly working like you thought and they don't probably have an ownership. Maybe they have invented the old system themselves or they know the guy who installed it, so there may be quite a lot of things working towards you. But I think at least one important thing is that the managers are really involved and field an obligation and an ownership to get it working in their side. Because if the managers are on their employees’ side and say ok guys, they haven’t understood our business and are lost, but we have kept them very tight all through the process. At least they feel a real obligation to get it working in their department or their site or whatever. But it's definitely one of the real big problems that is raised here.
• [Sarah] Yeah, I think that's a really good point, about making sure the top-level leadership wants this to happen. There's resistance here. We need to make sure the managers in the middle are on the same page and are able and willing to provide the support. You know that they need to get those people on side.
• What came to mind for me was, if you remember when we did that session with Elizabeth Moran, who wrote the book about the neuroscience of change. She talked about the idea of switch cost. And I found that very interesting because it was basically exactly what you described. Its initial acceptance, and then once the request becomes real, then it changes. And it isn't because the people haven't logically understood the intent, or that they were lying or inauthentic in their initial acceptance. It's just that they're defaulting back to what is more familiar. And so part of what she offered as advice to overcome that is what I mentioned earlier, which is trying to reward or incentivize effort, not overall outcome. So just thinking out loud, maybe for you and I understand you're probably going to say your company has an objection, which is another problem you have, but, one option could be saying, ok, for everyone that uses the solution, at least 50% of the time over the next month, they'll have some sort of reward. It's encouraging them to become more used to doing it in your specific scenario. But there also has to be some alignment on, what is our overall commitment to making this happen, because again, if you can't get everyone on the same page about what rewards, recognition, incentives are we willing to offer to drive this forward or what accountability are we willing to hold people to. Then I don't know how you solve the problem you have, because you can't be the only one wanting to drive the change? There has to be some alignment on that. So that is definitely a challenge.
• [Customer 2] I like the earlier statement. 3% of the people are change champions.
• [Sarah] That's the other thing is, can you find those influencers? And I think this is going back to what Marcus is saying. You can't hand hold everyone to the degree of catering to their opinions and requests. But, if you can find a couple key people that you think could have a lot of influence on everyone else, then it probably is worth taking a more labour-intensive hand holding approach.
• [Customer 1] What was said is very interesting because you don't want to throw loads of money developing it. You haven't got budget to do that. What Marcus is saying is let's listen to this person with this one particular person and change the system and work with him and work with him and get him on board. And there's two sides to every coin. One of the one of the great dilemmas about any system that you integrate is that you must get the balance between usability and functionality that you require for the business, and usability and functionality that the systems would like. If it goes one way where everyone has a system they like using, you end up with a system that's rubbish for the business. And if you go for a system that totally fits with the business, you end up with a system that the users don't adopt because it's too much hard work for them to do it and it's too painful. And getting that balance. It never stops, it's continuous improvement, but you have to almost say, well, I'm sorry. There’re outliers to this. You're going to have one person that's never going to adopt it. I'm not going to let that one particular person dictate the whole way that the application works for the business and the other outlander is like they're never going to do it. Well, if they're never going to do it, then you've just got to manage them. And you've got to manage them. And you've got to manage them. But you aim at the middle. You aim at the core people and say this, let’s get the system that's going to do the benefit for the business and people. And what that does sometimes is that you will have slight data mishaps where you allow free text sometimes, or you get spelling mistakes, or you allow a code to be more selective than you'd like to be sometimes, rather than prescriptive systems, which is what people push back on. And it's a real balance, and you've just got to work with your reporting. You've got to work with your contracts people. You got to work with all those people to get the balance of data and usability right. And years and years down the line, we still haven't got it right. And we never will because you'll do this at the end of days, but that's utopia. That's where you're aiming at.
• [Markus] The person which got pampered, the thing is we did not really change the system. For every change request we get, we ask ourselves and also our super user community whether their locally good idea is also a global good idea because everybody will be impacted. But the pampering was more about existing stuff. It was like, what do you want? and he would say, I want this and that. But it's already existing. Have you seen this? Have you seen that? Or like oh, now my app crashed. Stupid simple cases. Once he was extremely mad, called me at the six in the evening, saying it's not working. I cannot log in. I asked him to share his screen. The reason you can’t log in is because you're in pre prod, you want prod, right? OK. Right. Thank you. So, it's small stuff, which is a which were a huge drama for him. But at the end was not a big deal.
• [Sarah] I'm glad you said that, Marcus, because that was what I was going to say. My inclination is Rudy's team's issue is not with the system. And just like you're saying, Marcus, it wasn't that you were actually accommodating all of these changes. It's more that that person wants to feel heard. They need that support. They want to feel like you said we have your back. We're here. What do you need. To get them to the other side.
• [Markus] And also 1 lessons learned what I got from the hyper care. Even though you give everything and you solve all the issues and you answer all the questions properly, you still may only get the feedback. Yeah, it was OK. You can only lose.
• [Customer 1] No one ever phones up and says what a great job we're doing. They only have a phone up and tell you what you're doing is rubbish.
• [Markus] But, also taking one step back. One service is only one tiny application. They only spend one hour for example maybe two days a week with one service. So, they have three other days with other stuff which maybe annoying them or giving them headaches. So, it's not only about us, they may have also private issues. Sometimes we also learn that we should not take ourselves too serious sometimes because it's not all about us.
• [Sarah] Yeah. And I think that's the other part too is coming back to your point about the importance of the managers, thinking about company culture, etcetera. What's the root cause of the frustration or what's the root cause of them not wanting to adopt change. Sometimes it's the system. I think that's probably the least common. There's usually some other underlying emotion that is making them resist what you're asking them to do. That's what makes this topic so hard, though. Even if we do everything right, it's still not going to be perfect. It's still not going to get us gold stars across the board or what have you. There's a lot of layers to it and that's why it's always a fun topic to talk about, but also remains one of the biggest challenges for everyone.
• [Customer 1] That's why change managers get paid so well.
• [Customer 3] Just to add, there's no solver bullet to this. You are going to have engineers that resign. I've had 15 engineers that refuse to use a smartphone, never mind doing an implementation of it. My encouragement to those people was I immediately issued them all a reference letter for them to find another job. And I said good luck when you join a new company that don't have a system or application you need to use. But I think that the most important lesson is you need to start well in advance, even before you implement the system to really get buy in from the organisation and hammer on those issues that you are trying to eliminate by implementing the system. And keep that as the focus area. But as you all said, you are going to have unhappy people. You are going to have 1/3 of the business that will take this on will drive change management and really drive it. 1/3 would be mediocre. They'll be in between. And you'll have 1/3 that is completely upset and resisting to the new change. But in some cases I say to people tough, with you or without you, company has been around for maybe 100 years and it will still be around for 100 years. So, you either adapt to it and I know sometimes it's quite hard talk, but to keep on having to hammer people, that is completely resisting the change is sometimes casting a shadow that's so negative to the rest of the organisation. So, you need to eliminate those points as well. You need to take pretty much quick action as a leader to get at under control.
• [Sarah] Yeah, and that's really similar to the point that I mentioned earlier, is you have to expect that there could be attrition. That's the risk of evolving. People that don't want to evolve aren't going to fit anymore and that has to be OK. I think that's a really good point.
• Just one thing I wanted to say that you made me think of, and a couple of you have said already on this call, change is constant today. It's everywhere. It's not just technology, it's every part of the business all the time and that's not going to go away. There's also this idea of change leadership that I've talked about, and how that is different from change management. Change management being project focused, change leadership being people focused and really what that comes down to is having leaders throughout the different levels of the organisation, that are all of the time asking, what are your biggest challenges in your role? What's stopping you from doing a good job or being happy here or progressing or whatever that is. And because ultimately if you want to talk about getting ahead of it, that's how you get way, way ahead of it. And what's coming next and what is the next problem as a business that we need to solve. Because what are we hearing? What are the through lines? How do we resolve these issues? And that's a lot of work. It's a different way of operating than a lot of leaders and businesses are used to, but I just don't see any way around that going forward.
• [Markus] For IFS FSM, there's also let's say a way out if people really totally refuse to use the mobile app. It could be the tech portal since it's part of the same licence, there’s no extra cost. It’s browser based. There is a way out. Of course there's a question, do you want to, I don't want to say give up, but do you want to give them the option to choose or not? But at least there would be a way out. Yes, there is the cost effort to bring it up to speed, but no extra cost for licences, for example.
• [Sarah] I think that just comes back to the company’s decision on how important is this change, and how indicative is it of their unwillingness to do other things we're asking them to do. It's a balance. How many accommodations are we willing to consider versus how much do we need to infer that this person just isn't willing to grow in the ways that our business is growing. And there's no necessary right or wrong answer to that, it could be just it depends. But in my opinion, knowing where things are going, and how much more change is coming in the next two to five years, mean, if you have people that refuse to use an iPhone, that's only the very beginning.

Questions / Answers / Feedback / Responses:

• Q: Was Change Management for IFS FSM different from change management for any ERP or Service Management project?
• A: One difference was the hardware setup. We want Engineers - in Field Service and even Service Centre (against the standard from IFS) to use the IFS FSM mobile app only - and not everybody was positive about working with a mobile device only. Three main reasons was size of the screen, missing keyboard when you write reports, and using a smart phone overall.

Podcast:

• Communication Matters: Skills to Create Highly Engaged Service Teams
  https://www.futureoffieldservice.com/2025/03/12/communication-matters-skills-to-create-highly-engaged-service-teams/

Previous CollABorative on Change:

• IFS Service CollABorative - Think Tank on Change Management w/ Guest Speaker Dr. Elizabeth Moran
  https://community.ifs.com/ifs-service-collaborative-396/service-collaborative-february-2023-change-management-with-guest-speaker-dr-elizabeth-moran-32306

Next CollABoratives: 

• TBC 10:00 AM US ET / 15:00 GMT / 16:00 CET
  Combined CollABorative: Tech Talk: An IFS Acquisitions Overview

If you are an IFS Customer and you do not have the next meeting invitation to this CollABorative and would like to join, please click here to fill out the form.