AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and Organizational Change Management Toolkit - AWS Prescriptive Guidance
Objectives
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AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and Organizational Change Management Toolkit

Nicole Lenz, Sevan Latavitz, Melanie Gladwell, Amanda Rankin, Scott Watson, and Lanya Xiang, Amazon Web Services

Cloud value realization occurs when leaders put as much focus on the people side of change as they do on technology. As enterprises embark on cloud transformation, there is a temptation to focus first on the technology without planning for the organizational effects of cloud transformation on culture, roles, skills, and leadership. Yet again and again, we find that proactive focus on organization alignment, leadership, people ability, and culture is the key to realizing the transformational value of cloud adoption.

The AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and Organizational Change Management Toolkit helps prioritize the steps that cloud leaders and their teams must get right to realize the desired outcomes of cloud adoption. The AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework is a programmatic and evidence-based organizational change adoption framework. It includes a comprehensive set of templates, guidelines, and supporting artifacts, assessments, accelerators, and tools that are designed to accelerate adoption to the new ways of working when moving from the current state to a future state of cloud transformation.

The six points can be aligned to an agile sprint cadence, beginning with program kick-off through stakeholder alignment, business readiness, awareness building, and capability development, to create a sustainable long-term change. These six points are:

  1. Mobilize Team

  2. Align Leaders

  3. Envision the Future

  4. Engage the Organization

  5. Enable Capacity

  6. Make It Stick

AWS Change Acceleration Framework and OCM Toolkit

Each point breaks down into specific pieces of actionable work, and examples are provided throughout this publication. The AWS change acceleration approach has been designed with a focus on return on investment (ROI), to accelerate your organization's adoption of AWS services and solutions, minimize the effects on performance, and shorten project completion times. Improving your company's ability to change and adapt is key to transformational levels of success. As AWS continues to innovate at a rapid pace each year, and as your organization quickly adopts those solutions and further innovates, business value is enhanced. These initial cloud successes lead to faster, more efficient, and more cost-effective adoption, and the cycle of migration and modernization is repeated.

The AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and Organizational Change Management Toolkit is intended to cover the full scope of people-related issues and challenges throughout the lifecycle of a cloud transformation, and can be applied to align with a broader implementation effort. This framework guides customer adoption of AWS technologies, processes, and new ways of working by

  • Identifying, aligning, and mobilizing key leaders

  • Assessing and mitigating the organizational impacts of cloud transformation

  • Designing and driving organizational change acceleration, communications, training action plans, and leadership, sponsorship, and culture strategies and roadmaps

The remainder of this paper uses the term change acceleration to refer to change acceleration and organizational change management. In your organization, the term organizational change management (OCM for short) might be more familiar.

Objectives

Business outcomes are highly dependent on your organization, but can include the following:

  • Time savings: Identify and mitigate organizational, political, cultural, or leadership blockers that stand in the way of starting or scaling the cloud journey.

  • Employee engagement and growth: Create strategies for the workforce transformation to involve employees in the cloud journey, and to get them excited, prepared, and skilled in AWS technologies.

  • Reduced risk exposure: Manage and mitigate risk while rewarding and recognizing desired new behaviors to reduce the risk of non-compliance as things rapidly change with cloud adoption.

  • Organizational adaptability: Develop the ability to deliver more change at a faster pace, adopt quickly, and scale.

  • Transformation leadership alignment and mobilization: Strengthen leadership capability, mobilize leaders to drive transformational change, and enable outcome-focused, cross-functional decision making.

  • Workforce transformation: Create a high-value, agile, and adaptable workforce that can embrace change, innovation, and organizational agility to address changing customer and market demands (such as changes in buying patterns, changes in regulations, or remote versus on site working). Enable talent and modernize roles to attract, develop, and retain a digitally fluent, high-performing, and adaptable workforce that can autonomously drive key capabilities.

  • Talent enablement: Modernize talent management strategies across leadership, learning, rewards, inclusion, performance management, career mobility, and hiring to ensure that the right people with the right skills are in the right roles at the right time, and are demonstrating new, cloud-fluent behaviors.

  • Culture evolution: Assess, incrementally evolve, and codify organizational culture with digital transformation aspirations and best practices for agility, autonomy, clarity, and scalability.

  • Change adoption: Use outputs from change impact assessments to define a strategy for adopting the new ways of working while building a change coalition network and digital acumen to effectively leverage the cloud to accelerate business outcomes.

  • Organizational alignment: Establish ongoing partnerships among organizational structures, business operations, processes, talent, and culture to enable rapid adaptation to market conditions, and to improve your organization's ability to capitalize on new opportunities.

This guide breaks down the AWS Change Acceleration 6-Point Framework and Organizational Change Management Toolkit in a logical fashion so you can reference it throughout your cloud adoption journey. Each section focuses on one of the six points of the framework.