Organisation Change: Subject Matter Experts And Their Roles In Business Change
With organisation change, effective and productive collaboration between technical expertise and change management could lead to success. There can be times when a change team wants to bring in a subject matter expert or even an external guru only to meet resistance. The change expert might hear a question like: ”What do we need the subject matter expert for, when we already have you?” If confronted with a situation like this, what the change expert needs to do is to make a clear contrast between their own expertise, which is change, and the expertise of the subject matter expert. He should be able to explain what the subject matter expert could contribute to the success of the whole project.
The subject matter’s expertise is dealing with the minutia of the company and the business. Because they are experienced, they are well trained to handle even the smallest details, have highly qualified credentials, and they have a keen sense of intuition about the business. When it comes to organisation change, this is a vital expertise to have. The subject matter expert is able to carefully examine the technical details of the change project. This cross examination is actually their most important and critical task.
Due to overeagerness of the change team, there are times when they will just come up with a change project, develop it, and launch it without properly consulting a subject matter expert about the technical details. The change team takes this proposal to the senior management member that is sponsoring the project. The thing is, the higher management will usually not even ask if the proposal has been vetted already for technical issues. They will probably assume that the team has already done what they had to do in that aspect. As a result, the proposal is approved. The organisation change process moves forward only to come crashing to an almost immediate halt over a minor technical detail that should have been reviewed.
Having a subject matter expert at the table reduces the odds of this outcome. They are experienced with the business and will pinpoint and deal with the technical problems of the change proposal. Even more importantly, the subject matter expert can also provide effective solutions to the technical problems, because they are familiar with all the technology involved.
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