By Hanna Greenfield, Marketing Manager, Changefirst

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Some years ago Changefirst embarked on a mission to put all of our learning, tools, processes and experience online. In fact we’ve made almost everything we’ve developed and built in the last 20 years available on demand. What lay behind this was a strong desire to share what we had learned with a much larger number of users and organisations. At the same time many of our larger clients were asking for more scalable, consistent, cost-effective and convenient solutions.

So, what is driving this momentum behind the take up of on-demand and cloud-based solutions in change management? I’ve highlighted six reasons why this is happening:

1. The drive towards enterprise-wide change management capabilities means that much larger groups of executives, managers and employees need training and tools to be made available to them. Change Management is no longer the exclusive reserve of a small number of “experts”. And, for many organisations running face-to-face workshops for this number of people is prohibitive both from a cost and time perspective.

2. Project teams are now increasingly ‘virtual’. They may be working in different parts of the world or the country and it can simply be too difficult to get everyone together for workshops and planning meetings.

3. For many of our clients their project teams are made up of a ‘mosaic’ of external consulting professionals, contractors and full-time employees. There is a need to rapidly get everybody on the same page and using the same tools.

An On Demand solution can help improve project success rates by making the tools and methodology more accessible and allowing project and change managers to learn and apply quickly. The skills and tools will be retained within the organisation when the project ends or the project manager moves on. One of our clients also pointed out that it gave them a lot of security because change plans and lessons were retained on their portal rather than on the consultant’s laptop!

4. Employees in organisations have become more familiar with using apps in their personal lives and that combined with the improvements in on-demand learning and application tools has meant that working online has become a much more normal way of working for both organisations and employees.

5. There is real sense that time is more important now than it has ever been. This might be ‘time off the job’ or it might simply be that we need to implement goals or projects more quickly than we’ve ever done before. In a recent Fortune magazine article SAP's CEO - Bill McDermott said “What we used to innovate in 18 months is now coming out in monthly or even weekly cycles”. Speed has become incredibly important for organisations.

6. Lastly, a lot of organisations are currently under huge pressure to contain costs. Learning a change methodology online provides a cost-effective option. At a minimum, clients will slash their training budgets and associated costs by 75% and the use of subscription models and enterprise licences means that cost can be very predictable over a 3 or 5-year period.

So here’s the sales pitch…. A cloud-based change management solution allows project and change managers to learn, apply and collaborate on change management processes and plans without necessarily being in the same location. It provides organisations with a just-in-time application that can be rapidly deployed to help implement projects successfully.