5 Steps to Overcome Resistance to Organizational Changes in IT

Whether you’re launching a cloud-first initiative or migrating to a new platform, change in the daily operations of your IT department can be difficult for everyone involved. Outside of the actual work at hand, you need to overcome the cultural challenges — and resistance can sometimes be fierce.

Your IT staff and other departments who use your infrastructure and applications on a daily basis may not see the strategy behind the changes. They might wonder why you’re removing or changing a working system. They might assume a hardware upgrade can solve aging infrastructure and the outdated business processes that go along with it. They might worry about costs, potential layoffs, or competition stemming from automation or a lack of skills to manage the new initiative.

These concerns and others must be addressed before they become a drag on morale or a hindrance to operations. Here are five steps to overcome resistance to a new IT initiative in your organization.

1) Get executives on board

Often, change comes from the top down. If you’re a VP, Director, or Manager, you might need to go further up the stack. Team leaders and department heads also must talk to VP and C-Level leaders in order to secure vital support for the initiative. This will likely require justification at a budget as well as strategic level. Be ready to communicate the business advantages of the initiative and explain how you will minimize the disruption to your team and the organization as a whole.

An enthusiastic executive on your side will help immensely in overcoming resistance and helping to guide you as you navigate the cultural and political implications.

2) Communicate early and often

Once you’ve settled on how the project will proceed – even if that means broad strokes – you need to begin communicating clearly with all involved parties: managers, employees, partners, and vendors. Explain why the initiative is happening, what it entails, the full scope of the project, why current systems will no longer work, and the timeline.

As an example, if you’re going cloud first, you might explain the goal is to try and become more responsive to the shifting IT landscape, it’s a good time because you are in need of a hardware refresh and licensing will expire on several applications, you’re going with ABC Cloud Provider, and it will allow more flexible IT budget as well as more hardware capabilities. You plan to move 75% of your applications to the cloud within the next three quarters.

3) Take it to an individual level

The overall business strategy of your IT shift might be apparent, but you need to get every team member on board, and that means communicating individual benefits and opportunities. Describe how the project might make some administration tasks easier – or be realistic if it will make them harder. Either way, opportunity should be there for the taking, in terms of recognition for exceptional performance executing the initiative, learning new skills and platforms, and advancing careers.

This step also involves communicating more of the plan and scope of the project. Work with team leaders and/or individual employees to lay out what they will do first, second, third, etc; how progress will be tracked; who they can turn to when they need assistance; and how your team structure and assignments will shift, if they will.