Online extra | Moving to a COE easier through change management

Part of Treasury’s overall plan to migrate to HR Connect was a two-pronged change management plan.The first piece was training the trainers. This included making sure the people who were going to help the employees use the system understood how HR Connect worked and could answer any questions.“We had a workforce that was used to using a multitude of systems, so it wasn’t an easy task,” said Denis McGurin, director of HUD’s office of administrative services, IT support division. “One of the things we did early on was a business process analysis to determine the workflow. We had to look at how we were going to change how the workforce does business.”The second piece was the communication program to educate HUD’s 10,000 employees.Sharman Lancefield, HUD’s deputy assistant secretary for operations, said about 72 percent of the employees had registered to use the system in the first year, and of the 37,000 transactions, 20,000 were done by HUD workers.“We tried to communicate in a variety of ways, including the Web, flyers, by e-mail [and] through training sessions,” Lancefield said. “We extended it to field offices as well. In fact, the field offices have a higher registration rate than headquarters.”