Change Management

Prof. Sugata Sanyal linkedin

Success Story of Magma Fin Corp, a Case Study

Change is the only constant, but it’s often painful. Driving change management becomes more complex than it sounds, especially in organizations with a long history of success. How does an organization cope with the evolving change? And how does it bring in major change initiatives and make them successful? This question grapples many management practitioners. There is no easy or unique answer to this.

However a few organizations have already walked this path successfully. Magma Fincorp Limited is a Kolkata based Non-Banking Finance Company (NBFC), doing business in asset based financing business for the last 26 years. One of the key and successful technology initiatives in Magma has been the ‘Mobility Strategy’. Magma has transformed its sales organization from a traditional way of doing business via pen-and-paper to a fascinating mobile enabled workforce. This mobility initiative is already well-known in the industry as a great example of IT-Business collaboration. The IT team has built a solid technology platform over the last couple of years. The sales executives were provided with Android tablets, having offline sales apps, through which they could capture customer requirements. These apps were connected real time with the core system and external bureaus for faster decisions. Rule driven decision making capabilities were built into the apps. All of these innovations reduced manual work and  decision time ,which resulted in improved customer experience.

Changing the way of doing business is not straight-forward most of the time. The key to the success of any Enterprise Change Management initiative is getting a buy-in from the stakeholders. The project needs to have a sponsor from the senior management, who buys the idea and helps drive the project. He becomes the agent of change in the organization. Also to make such initiatives successful, it’s very important to clearly communicate the change benefits and update the stakeholders of the progress status constantly. As seen in the industry, three major steps need to be considered by the project champions who are managing organizational change initiatives:

1) Robust technology: Building a foolproof system is vital, especially when a large user group is being targeted. The software product needs to be supported in a well-coordinated manner. This resolves the teething issues and helpsthe business adopt it.

2) Business-IT collaboration: It’s always important that the key stakeholders are on board and are able to see the benefits. IT teams can build fantastic platforms, but unless the business team sees benefits in them, the projects will never become successful. Working together has never been more important.

3) Feed forward: Using analytics data helps measure the adoption rate and also find the challenges users may be facing. IT team should work with the business in providing data enabled support to increase adoption.

The stakes are always high whenever a large organization works on a transformational project. Getting the desired results out of the project needs to be planned and envisioned. A proper change management program can help organizations overcome the teething issues and win over the stakeholders to achieve the targets.

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Huge credit goes to Subhamoy Chakraborti, Head of Enterprise Mobility, Magma Fincorp for his kind help.

Prof. Sugata Sanyal linkedin