7 Steps To Implement Effective Change Management In Your IT Support Team

One of the biggest concerns in IT Support—is being able to evolve with changing business support needs. And one of the biggest deficiencies in how your IT is implemented—is acquiring and growing your IT Support team’s knowledge base, capabilities and expertise to support your changing technology needs. More so than simply saying they are able to support your users is the need for your IT Support team to gain competencies in the technologies that your organization is pursuing or planning on pursuing in the near future.

Change is hard for users. Will your IT Support make things easier?

While many of IT support companies are passive or indifferent to needing added knowledge and expertise in your changing demands (taking a philosophy of “we’ll figure things out when we have to”), you need a support team that evolves its documentation and team’s core competencies as your support needs change. The pace of business technology change is NOT slowing down—if your support is not caught up on what meets your changing tech demands, they won’t be of any help to your users when new implementations occur. Trust me, when users confront tech changes, you need IT support that is able to direct users toward solutions and enable them for success.

Especially with recent growing cybersecurity concerns, your business needs effective change in how its technology is implemented to secure sensitive data. And in light of disasters, your IT Support team needs to ensure your systems are backed up and that you have a pathway to full system recovery. With growing demands on technology to both keep your business safe AND competitive, your IT team needs to be open to change management more than ever.

How Can Your IT Support Team Change?

Managing change involves handling complexity of the process. Your IT Support needs to evaluate, plan and implement operational changes, tactics and strategies that will make your users more productive and their inquiries, issues and solutions resolved quickly.

Here are 7 Considerations your IT Support should consider when addressing change within your organization:

Change management in an IT support framework is dynamic—there will never be one way to address change. When your IT support implements changes to an environment—whether as a directive from your leadership team or in response to growing security concerns—IT Support team needs to be able to respond and adapt to the changes. Response to change requires thoughtfulness. Your team needs to evaluate all possible ways of adapting their support structure to your new technology. Your IT Support team also requires good communication throughout the entire team on how a change will be addressed.

There is never a choice between technology and people-oriented solutions—all solutions should consider the technology AND people affected by that technology. When adopting new technology, your IT support should understand (1) who is impacted (2) understand the differences between the old and new systems (3) communicate and teach users on how to adapt to changes and (4) understand how to support issues with vendors supporting the software.

Unfreeze old behaviors and introduce new ones— your IT Support or Managed Services Provider needs to understand that change can often be continuous, sporadic, occasional or rare. Predictable change allows for preparation, but when change (or the effects or change) are unexpected, your team needs to be able to respond. Identify the problem, evaluate possible solutions, decide on a resolution and document the process in case the issue arises again.

Even if your management promotes change, your IT Support team should understand why change is happening—to better support users, your support team needs not only to be up-to-speed on changes implemented in your organization’s environment, but also should have an understanding why changes have occurred. This will enable them to better support and eliminate problems for users.

Clear vision and planning promotes effective change— keep in mind, change requires vision and planning. If your organization needs new or different tech solutions, your IT Support team should be figuring out what they need to do to make your users’ transition to a different platform seamless. Measuring outcomes and evaluating your IT Support team’s change process is also essential to determine whether the way your support team implements change is effective.

Change should be an inclusive process—your organization will not get its full value out of a change initiative if everyone is not on board with changes. Top-down initiatives often fall short of the desired result because your entire team—especially those specifically affected with the change—are not involved in finding optimal change solutions. By including your IT support team in the conversation when planning and implementing changes to IT Support in light of tech changes within your company, your team will likely have unique perspectives from working directly with users—to help implement support that will be more effective at keeping your users happy and resolving their issues quicker.

Promoting change can be exhausting work—promoting change—no matter how large—can be demanding and exhausting. Bringing about change requires managers to present a problem with the current way of doing things, requires perseverance to face hard-to-change habits and norms and establish a new norm of behavior on your team. Change takes time and should, when able, be proactively addressed rather than reactionary responses to poorly implemented process alterations.

The only way your business can be sustainable and competitive in today’s market is having an IT infrastructure and IT Support team that is able to change, adapt and evolve with your business’ growing and changing technical support needs. IT support and management that does not see change management as a critical component to their support model risk growing user issues, lower user satisfaction and longer resolution times resolving even easy issues (easy if the IT Support team recognized and planned for change!).

Are you sure your IT Support team is able to change as your business’ technology demands change? Contact me TODAY for a network assessment!