The biggest change management project I’ve experienced in the print industry is the Print MIS/ERP transition (by far). I always say that changing Print MIS/ERP systems is like heart surgery for the business—but done while you’re awake and still expected to keep the business running! Over the years, I’ve seen many patterns of how the humans that are most impacted by the change react. No matter the size of the organization or the scale of the system change, we typically see all the flavors of resistance in one form or the other in every project.

We’re all pretending to be logical and rational businesspeople so we’re looking for logical or rational reasons for why there is resistance to the change. The transition isn’t going well, so we look for facts. We ask for the issues or objections or barriers. We try to be responsive in our resolutions of issues. We do all this hard work and the transition continues to falter. The issues seem to be growing, not receding. The response time and resolution rate doesn’t seem to matter. Basically you’re working harder and harder and not cutting through the resistance in any meaningful way.

So you start to think that you must have made a mistake in your choice of software technologies or there must be an issue with the team doing the implementation. You’re like a heat-seeking missile looking for the root cause of the “resistance.” Your people are acting reasonably. They seem to be cooperating, just not moving forward in a meaningful way, so you have more and more activity and very little results. Some companies punt at this juncture. They assume it must be the software or the vendor and they cut their losses and stop the implementation, revert back to the legacy system, and start looking for another replacement. That is so painful. Money, time, opportunity cost. So expensive for the business and bad for the morale of the humans. You might get a brief sense of relief from the resistance as humans go back to a system they were comfortable with, but when you start talking about looking for another replacement, the resistance returns.