Organisation Change: Subject Matter Experts And Their Roles In Organisation Change

With organisation change, effective and productive collaboration between technical expertise and change management could lead to success. There can be times when a change team wants to bring in a subject matter expert or even an external guru only to meet resistance. It's not uncommon for the change expert to hear a question like this: ”What do we need the subject matter expert for, when we already have you?” If confronted with a situation like this, what the change expert needs to do is to make a clear contrast between their own expertise, which is change, and the expertise of the subject matter expert. This may mean explaining just what it is that the subject matter expert brings to the table.

The subject matter expert is very well trained with the small details of the business. They are greatly experienced in the business, have outstanding credentials, and they have very good business sense and intuition. This can be crucial expertise to have during organisation change. Furthermore, a subject matter expert can examine the technical aspects of the change initiative. This examination process is their most vital role.

Due to overeagerness of the change team, there are times when they will just come up with a change project, develop it, and launch it without properly consulting a subject matter expert about the technical details. The change experts then take this project proposal to the upper management for approval. This senior management member probably isn’t going to ask if the proposal has been vetted for technical issues. It is very likely they will assume the change team has done its job and had the proposal vetted. The proposal gets approved. The process for organisation change moves along only to fail in the end because of a technical detail that wasn't taken into account.

To avoid this result, it's best to have a subject matter expert on hand. They are experienced with the business and will pinpoint and deal with the technical problems of the change proposal. And because they're familiar with technology too, they will also be able to offer practical solutions to the most complex technical issues.

For more information, please see our website: Organisation Change