Alliance Healthcare is a major supplier and distributor of pharmaceutical, surgical, medical, and healthcare products throughout Europe. Supplying more than 110,000 pharmacies, doctors and hospitals from 288 distribution centres, across 11 countries, Alliance Healthcare is no small operation, and with this comes an ever-changing landscape.
Alliance Healthcare
Project Context
Alliance Healthcare understands the value and importance of implementing and managing change within their portfolio of IT projects for the success of the business, especially considering the uncertain and dynamic landscape of supply & distribution in recent years. Due to the organisational wide nature of the projects delivered by the IT department, although change management initiatives were integrated into plans, not all were leading to lasting change. Alliance Healthcare identified pockets of teams reverting back to previous ways of working or using a work around, therefore losing the full impact that the project was aiming to deliver. As a result, Nine Feet Tall were brought on board to build capability and develop change management skills with an aim to empower their changes managers to deliver future change that would stick.
Project Delivery
Nine Feet Tall looked to build on the IT teams understanding of change management by delivering a number of workshops that would identify areas of strength within the team, but also highlight areas for working on to build their change management skills and confidence in delivery of change, and ultimately increase adoption. The results from these workshops guided the areas of focus for building capability using theory and real life examples, namely:
- Initiating projects in a way that consider change management
- Stakeholder management
- Communications planning
- People impact of change
- Business impact of change
- Engagement stages
- Planning of resource, cost, and task timescales
Nine Feet Tall utilised a ‘light touch’ approach, enabling autonomy in the learning and development process, but also providing just enough governance to allow the team to develop their skills to enable them to independently and confidently deliver future change projects. A series of frameworks and tool kits were developed, unique to Alliance Healthcare, that would ensure consistency across the delivery of change projects, but also to act as a resource for building improved change practices.
Outcome
The Alliance Healthcare team, above all else, are now empowered with the knowledge, skillset and practical experience to delivery future change that sticks.
