Implementation Cycle through the Eyes of the Grief

During my professional career, I have spent over a decade implementing software systems for company and clients all over the United States. I have worked for some of the biggest and best consultant firms and worked with growing companies as an implementation partner. I primarily focus on HCM System Implementations, however, I believe the things I've learned here can be used across systems and implementations.

Introduction

In today's fast-paced business environment, organizations are increasingly reliant on complex technology systems to drive efficiency and innovation. However, the journey from system deployment to full operational readiness is burdened with challenges. Ensuring that a new product meets all functional and performance criteria before it goes live is essential, yet many organizations struggle with phases within the implementation cycle due to user acceptance status.

User acceptance is a critical milestone for any implementation. While ensuring the implementation meets the business requirements and is ready for operational use is key, as implementation partners, we must consider human impact and management of emotions during the implementation cycle.

One may read the title of this document and struggle to find a correlation between an implementation cycle and the grief cycle, furthermore, how one may even influence the other. However, I pose this perspective. Through implementation, the client is experiencing a level of loss.

How do we, as implementation partners, help our clients navigate the loss, move through the stages of grief, and enter the acceptance stage in time for deployment?

Role of Implementation Partners

Implementation partners play a pivotal role in bridging the gap between system deployment and operational readiness. With their deep expertise and comprehensive approach, they help organizations navigate the complexities of system acceptance, ensuring that the new system is fully aligned with business objectives and user expectations.

This document explores how implementation partners can assist clients in preparing for system acceptance. It delves into the strategies, best practices, and tools that partners employ to facilitate a smooth and successful acceptance process. By understanding these key elements, organizations can better leverage their implementation partners to achieve a seamless transition to new systems.

Managing Grief during Implementation

Grief is an experience we will all encounter at some level during our lifetime. Grief can be presented for many different reasons, loss of a loved one, loss of a relationship, (ex. Divorce), or even a significant life change can result in loss of routine or identify. According to the American Psychological Association, grief is the experience of coping with loss or an emotional response to loss. This can be applied to implementation cycles where our client may experience loss and may be forced to respond to that loss. For our clients, grief may result from the loss of their legacy system, loss of being the subject matter expert for existing processes, or loss of confidence as they begin to navigate a new product.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five common stages of grief including, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. In my 15 years of project implementation, I regularly see clients rotate among the first four stages many times throughout the implementation cycle before entering the acceptance stage.

Grief isn’t the same experience for everyone. Many direct and indirect factors can attribute to the level of grief experienced during an implementation. How involved you are in current state processes may impact the level of grief you experience. How impactful the change is to your daily duties may intensive the level of grief you experience. If you are an executive sponsor on the project, you may have an indirect experience to implementation grief, where you may only be affected by the overflow of the project team’s emotions and you may not encounter a loss or grief experience from the implementation directly.

While the stage of grief can present in any order, at any time, during any phase of the implementation cycle, this is the parallel between stages of grief and implementation phases drawn from experience on a variety of projects.

Table 1: Typical Relationship between Stages of Grief and Implementation Phases

Stage/Phase	Planning	Design	Development	Testing	Deployment	Support
Denial	X	X	X
Anger			X	X
Bargaining	X	X	X	X
Depression				X	X
Acceptance					X	X

Denial

Often denial comes in forms of stubbornness or omission of information. Stubbornness, in which the client believes current state doesn’t need altered or improved, and omission of information, in which the client may negate to disclose all pain points or steps within current state processes. During the planning and design phase, implementation partners may not receive all details required to plan, design and development a solution as the client may still live in a place where their current process is accomplishing the end goal regardless of what the new solution can improve.

With stakeholders and sponsors help, implementation partners can support the client’s project team members and subject matter experts during project timeline. Stakeholders and sponsors can continually voice their support and commitment to the project. While implementation partners can invest time and effort in learning about the members’ perspectives, understanding their viewpoint, offering compassion, being an active listener and letting the client know we are partners in this transition.

Strategies to support Clients:

1.     Educate the client by providing detailed information and case studies to illustrate the necessity and benefits of the project.

2.     Engage by involving clients in planning and design discussions to ensure they understand the project’s value.

3.     Provide transparency by clearly communicate the project’s goals, timelines and expected outcomes.

Anger

In the professional world, anger rarely portraying itself in a brutal or physical manner. More commonly, anger is a real emotion experienced by clients as they express frustration due to challenges or disruptions caused by the project. Anger can present itself as impatience, irritability, or overreactions to minor details. This can manifest in ways of interruptions, dismissive behavior, and passive aggression.

As implementation partners, it is important to remember, this is not a personal attack on us, anger can sometimes be directed at innocent parties, and this is only a reaction to a client’s feeling of loss. Anger is often thought of as a defense mechanism to help one feel in control in a situation they feel is out of their control. While we, as implementation partners, may have been part of many implementations prior, this could be the first implementation for a client and should be considered as we offer grace and empathy for angry outpourings. To help our clients manage this emotional response, implementation partners can offer a safe place for clients to express their feelings without fear of retaliation, acknowledge their feelings and listen to their perspectives while offering insight and partnership as we proceed to future state.

Strategies to support Clients:

1.     Engage in active listening and acknowledge their frustrations and show empathy.

2.     Address specific issues promptly and provide clear solutions to indicate problem solving partnership.

3.     Keep clients informed about progress and any changes to the plan with regular updates and frequent communication.

Bargaining

While bargaining may be considered interchangeable with the common business practice of negotiating, bargaining as an emotion or a response to grief tends to manifest in the client as rumination over what the system ‘should have been’, holding the implementation partners responsible for solutions they deem undesirable, overthinking and/or blaming others. As seen in Table 1, bargaining occurs during most stages of the implementation cycle which highlights why this is an important emotion for implementation partners to help clients navigate. Bargaining can be productive to a point but should be managed in a way that the timeline, budget, and project is not put at risk.

When a client begins bargaining, implementation partners must empathetically consider the client’s requests, clarify the requests, evaluate the root cause of the requests, assess feasibility, offer options, and communicate clearly to ensure the client feels heard and respected while experiencing this emotion.

Strategies to support Clients:

1.     Maintain flexibility by being open to reasonable adjustments and offer alternative solutions.

2.     Reiterate the value and benefits of the project to justify growing pains.

3.     Aim for compromises that benefit both parties to indicate a partnership and a commitment to implementation success.

Depression

Depression can have a significant impact on the project implementations. As a result of depression, clients could experience decreased productivity, motivation, communication, and overall quality of work. As implementation partners, we need to alert and aware of the signs of depression within our projects and consult with project leadership to implement supportive measures to mitigate these effects and support their employees' mental health. Furthermore, being actively aware of your clients and their mental health can lead to more successful project outcomes in the long term. Depression seems to become more pronounces and prevalent during the heavy lifting phases such as testing and deployment. Clients may feel overwhelmed by the project's complexity, challenges, or the approaching go-live date, leading to a sense of hopelessness and exhaustion.

Strategies to support Clients:

1.     Provide additional support and resources to help clients through difficult phases.

2.     Encourage client by highlighting progress and celebrating small win to boost morale.

3.     Clearly communicate to ensure clients understand status, progress and steps being taken to address any outstanding items or issues.

Acceptance

As clients begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel or the pot at the end of the rainbow, they begin to experience acceptance. Degree of acceptance can vary by user. Acceptance doesn’t mean complete agreement; it means the client accepts the project and is ready to move forward into the new and provide ongoing support, where needed. As users become ready and willing to adopt the new system or process, it marks a crucial milestone in measuring a successful implementation. It is the intent of the project to have users in an acceptance mindset by deployment and continuing through the support phase.

As implementation partners, we can recognize the signs of user acceptance by monitoring feedback, user engagement statistics, utilization rates, and performance metrics. Understanding the results and signs of acceptance can allow us to take proactive steps to address any foreseen challenges.

Strategies to support Clients:

1.     Ensure there is a seamless transition from deployment to support.

2.     Provide comprehensive trainings and knowledge transfer sessions to help client make the most of their new system.

3.     Offer ongoing support and encourage clients to look for opportunities to enhance the solution.

Conclusion

The above depicture of the implementation cycle through the eyes of grief shares the importance of recognizing and managing the emotional impacts of implementation on clients. Understanding the emotional journey, a client faces during the implementation cycle allows implementation partners to tailor their approach at each phase of the project. By addressing the specific needs and concerns associated with each emotional stage, implementation partners can directly affect and foster a more positive and productive client relationship, ultimately resulting in a successful project and user acceptance.

Resources

1 Kubler-Ross, D., & Kessler, E. (2014). On grief and grieving. Simon & Schuster.

2 American Psychological Association. (n.d.). Just-world hypothesis. In APA dictionary of psychology. Retrieved January 18, 2020, from https://dictionary.apa.org/just-world-hypothesis