Google Workspace Change Management Practices

Moving to the cloud has huge, benefits, but it’s a big change. Big changes at companies require thoughtful guidance and communication even when the change has as much upside as Google Workspace. Sometimes the success of the change hinges not on the change itself, but how it’s managed.

The goal is to generate the information to complete the change plan, but to do so in an interactive way,through brainstorming and discussion.A excellent change management will give best results in your investment in Google Workspace, increase productivity, and address user concerns, such as:

• Why are we switching?

• What happens to my old email and data?

• How will I get up to speed?

WHAT’S THE VALUE OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT?

• Organize company-wide changes to Google Workspace.

• Reduce any period of coexistence (running both your legacy systems and Google Workspace)

• Reduce holdouts and resistors and increase user satisfaction.

• Increase productivity and speed adoption

Change management is a discipline that involves ensuring that change is implemented smoothly and with lasting benefits, helps manage the change process, and also ensures control in the budget, schedule, scope, communication, and resources. The change management plan will minimize the impact a change can have on the business, employees, customers.

Objective :

UNDERSTAND THE GOOGLE WORKSPACE JOURNEY

1) WHAT'S CHANGING FOR OUR ORGANIZATION

Here are the general types of changes that can affect your users or organization as you move to Google Workspace.

• Product changes—Any new tool requires time to get users at an expected rate or level. Most users can start reading and sending messages in Gmail within minutes, but power users in your organization—executives or administrative assistants—may need more support or training.

• Policy changes—Google Workspace offers lots of new features, and your organization must decide how to use them. For example, if users can now access email on their phones, does this affect your mobile device policy?

• Process changes—Some internal processes or procedures may change with integrated into your environment. For example, if your organization used shared mailboxes to manage mail queues, you might update some processes to use Gmail with Google Groups.

2 )WHO'S IMPACTED AND HOW :

Transitioning to Google Workspace will impact all employees and organizations, as you are going to move from your legacy system to Google Workspace. The way users access emails, documents, and tasks for the IT team has changed.

KEY SERVICES FOR NEW USERS TO DEMONSTRATE

• Searching in Gmail

• Creating meetings and checking availability in the Calendar  

• Uploading and storing documents in Drive

• Sharing, collaborating and editing in Docs

• Manage full domain by using the admin console

• Backup email by using Google vault

Guiding Principles

• We all come from different backgrounds and experiences, so let's start off by setting some parameters for how we will work together as a team.   

• What are the principles we want to put in place to guide our approach?

• For example :

• Keep it short - communications should be short and to the point.  Else no one will read or comprehend them.

• Stay Consistent - communications should be consistent across varying channels to prevent confusion

• Show “what’s in it for me” - messages should appeal to the users and why they should care.  This is not just an IT initiative

• Lead by example - our leadership should be bought in and be espousing the tools, using them and promoting them

• Be able to communicate your elevator pitch - all stakeholders should be able to state the case for change

• Be open to user feedback and take action

• Make it fun - Explore different and unique ways to keep staff engaged and informed

• Focus on the user, not IT - make decisions based on what’s best for our users, not based on what’s best for IT. Let’s put our business user hat on as much as possible.

NEW MESSAGING FEATURES AND BEHAVIORS:

Before we begin planning for this change, it's helpful to know some of the major differences between how people are currently working and how they will be working on Google Workspace.

• To get on board with these new tools, users will also need to understand the functionality and benefits of

  • Gmail: Search (instead of sort)

  • Inbox organization

• Conversation threads

• Labels

• Archiving

Settings and labs (e.g., “Undo send”)

• Saving files:

• Drive

• Working online and offline

• Calendar

• Finding meeting rooms and available times

• Attaching invites

NEW COLLABORATION FEATURES AND BEHAVIORS

It’s also helpful to really understand what it means to collaborate using Google Workspace

  The big advantage is that users can work together in one document.

• People no longer have to deal with multiple document versions; now have one single source of truth from which to work.

  Working together means sharing materials with others and working in the same document, where colleagues can see what you’re doing.

• Working anywhere on your tablet or phone.  

• Accessing people and information

  • Sharing links

  • Chat/Video conferences

The Google Workspace Rollout

For a company of 250 or more employees, a standard Google Workspace transition is divided into three phases:

• Phase 1: Core IT

• Phase 2: Early Adopters

• Phase 3: Global Go-Live

Each phase generally lasts about four weeks, although this varies with the size of your company and the specifics of your legacy system. The transition is usually complete within 90 days. During each of the three phases, you progressively configure more Google Workspace features, migrate more data from your legacy system, and move more of your users to Google Workspace.

Phase 1: Core IT In this phase, members of your IT team start using Google Workspace. This gives your IT team the opportunity to familiarize themselves with Google Workspace and plan the next.

two phases. Your IT team begins receiving their mail-in Google Workspace, but no migration of legacy data occurs.

Phase 2: Early Adopters. During this phase, you may begin migrating data from your legacy system, including user accounts, mail, and calendar data. The purpose of this phase is for you to perform a full Google Workspace change for a comparatively small number of users.

Phase 3: Global Go-Live This is what you’ve been waiting for—the day when all your users begin using Google Workspace. As your users become more familiar with Google Workspace, they’ll become more productive and begin to take advantage of all the benefits of their new web-based tools.