A well-intentioned ambition to let frontline managers take the lead on digital experiments risks being overrun by new initiatives that come from the top without the involvement and consideration of the capacity, skills and operations of the frontline manager. This article offers three tips on how you as an executive board and management team can prepare managers for IT implementation.
A large Danish municipality had just implemented a new ERP system. The choice of the system was based on a business case at a strategic level without the involvement of frontline management. This meant that the managers affected were not given any influence on the setup, design or timeline of the process, which, incidentally, was right on top of the implementation of a new telephone system and another new specialist system, which the manager had not had any influence on either.
The system had been 'powered up' as planned, and the organization was going through the phase usually referred to as 'hypercare', where there is an intense and short-term focus on developing competencies and adapting the system in collaboration with the supplier to eliminate the worst teething problems. However, the implementation failed because it was not backed up by a longer-term focus on developing and embedding new competencies to use the system and the necessary behavioral changes. The administration could in no way live up to the expected results that were so beautifully formulated in the business case. And who was responsible? The frontline manager, who was neither involved in nor had the skills to run a complex IT implementation project.
The scenario is not atypical. The well-intentioned ambition to let frontline management initiate and drive digital experiments is being overrun by digital initiatives that are being pushed down from the top without sufficient involvement and consideration for capacity, skills and operations. To understand the challenges that typically arise in IT implementation processes, we need to understand the way we most often build our public organizations.
The professionally skilled frontline manager
Effective public organizations often succeed because their employees have a high level of professionalism and are able to create results by translating their professionalism into value for the citizens in the field they work in. If you really manage to translate your professionalism into value and have budding people management skills, you may be promoted to manager-by-employee. So, as a frontline manager, you are often given your management responsibilities because you are a really good educator or a skilled caseworker with good people management skills, but it will almost never be a concrete prerequisite for becoming a manager that you are also a skilled project owner with an understanding of IT implementation.
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Digital leadership in project tsunami
If we raise our gaze from the frontline manager to the municipal executive boards, their prerequisite for success is the ability to translate political decisions into structures and systems that enable the public organization to deliver better welfare for fewer resources.
Here, digital transformation is rightly a key focus point, often resulting in the executive board and management team launching more initiatives than the organization has the capacity for - typically because the complexity of IT implementation is underestimated (see e.g. Digitaliseringsstyrelsen Status og Porteføljeoverblik, 2021).
The result, as also described in the case, is a project tsunami, where frontline managers are forced into complex IT project management and away from the management of the discipline they were hired to lead.
Often the result is that processes drag on, the project becomes more expensive than budgeted and well-being declines because employees can't perform their tasks and because 'IT just doesn't work'. And the frontline manager, who had neither launched the digital initiative nor had the professional prerequisites to succeed, ends up taking the blame for the failed project.
3 tips to prepare frontline managers for IT implementation
1. Don't think it's over once the system is powered up. Prepare for the challenges that are sure to come in the post-hypercare period when competencies and behaviors need to be embedded in the organization. Involve frontline managers in prioritizing the most important challenges based on impact/value, time and complexity. Regularly communicate to both managers and employees what is currently being worked on. In the case above, this resulted in a weekly newsletter that clarified which challenges had been solved, which ones were being worked on and the prioritization of the remaining challenges that had been reported.
2) Involve those who will use the system. Frontline managers must be supported in explaining meaning and goals to their employees and translating them into operational behavior - how will the IT system affect the way we work today? How do we ensure that employees and managers have the necessary skills? Also, make sure to create communication channels for feedback and let those who will be using the system have a say in prioritizing the biggest challenges to be solved.
3. Understand the everyday life of your employees. Take an interest in how the system affects specific workflows and how it challenges the usual way of performing tasks. Use resources such as internal digitalization consultants to observe how the system affects workflows, what challenges them and how they can best be supported.
IT implementation processes are complex, and the three tips above are not a quick fix that makes it easy. However, they are three key points that are often overlooked because organizations are expected to automatically change their behavior once a new system is powered up. However, this linear causal thinking rarely holds true, and both project management and involvement are needed so that the frontline manager is not left frustrated and wondering who put digitalization on her head.
