Using AI to support change management in marketing orchestration

Summary

TLDR: for any change you should have a change management plan. If you can't (or won't) hire a change manager to handle it, AI can be helpful. These are some practical tips for how to use these new tools to develop a workable change management plan. Not my recommended approach, but better than nothing.

By Tom Swanson, Senior Engagement Manager at Heinz Marketing

When I talk to leaders about change management, there is one response I get more than any other:

“Change management is really important, but we don’t have the time/energy to invest in it.”

Then their marketing orchestration initiative fails and they are left wondering why they can’t fix this darn orchestration issue (even with AI itself).  It really boggles my mind, as I feel like it is such an avoidable problem.

In the energetic years of my youth, I would get out my old soapbox and start making passionate speeches about the importance of investing in effective change management. Those were the old days, and time has rendered me into a wizened mid-30’s man with a back-ache.

The mantra of “perfect is the enemy of good enough” is both a blessing and a curse, as good enough doesn’t (but should) include effective change management.

Anyway, enough ramblings of this ancient marketer, here is the point:

Some change management plan is better than none, and AI can help you get there faster than doing it yourself.

So let’s talk about how to use AI to build up a change management plan so your orchestration effort stands a better shot at making at past the first test run.

Defining the future state

First things first, start by clearly defining your business problem.  This will be helpful for your AI buddy.  Your problem is likely marketing orchestration debt, so you can learn more about that in this post by Sarah.

Then, core to any change effort is defining the change you want to see.  For marketing orchestration, this is going to look like a few sentences around how you want your team to function.  Describe this as a perfect world.  How would your team run ideally?

Then you will want to break it down to the component pieces you are trying to fix.  For marketing orchestration, these generally look like:

• Known and followed SLA timelines
• Defined hand-offs in the process
• Smoother hand-offs
• Better briefs
• Easier review processes
• Less executive pressure late in the workflow
• Consistent outputs
• Clear intake scenarios
• Clear requests from other teams
• Limited flexibility in prioritization

That’s just a few, I have seen way, way more.  But the point is that you define this.  You can get AI’s help in wording these, but you really should define it yourself and not outsource this thinking.

Your prompting for what model to choose and how to wrap the future state into a change plan will depend on how clear you get here.

Change models

These are a dime a dozen, and the good news is they are all well documented online.  Personally, I like the ACMP model, but lots of folks go for McKinsey’s ADKAR.  They all have their strengths and weaknesses, which one you select will depend on your past comfort and how well the model fits your desired future state.

My pitch for the ACMP one is pretty straightforward: it defines more than just the steps for the change.  It moves smoothly from strategy to plan to action, and covers each for key points like communication, stakeholder/sponsor engagement, and risk management.  It is the most thorough of any of the models at the general level.

The downside is that it can get gaudy.

Most of the time, the person you hire is going to use these models as a framework, but each model needs to be adapted to the change.

Tips for using AI to select a model:

• Get an outline of a change plan in each major model you are considering
• Ask it for case studies of each model in your field
• Have it select sections and components to cut, in order to keep it streamlined and ask why it is cutting what it selects
• Ask it how else it would customize the model to fit your specific orchestration future state
  • Marketing teams are complex, so this will be an interesting exercise
• Tell it about the available data/assets you can feed into it to support the development of the plan

Building the plan

This starts straightforwardly.  Once you have selected the model, prompt your LLM of choice to produce a change plan in that model.  Per the tips before, you want to ensure that it is customizing the model to match your needs.

How good the plan is will really depend on what you can feed it as support material.  Here are some options to inspire you:

• Team interview/meeting transcripts
• Team survey data
• Marketing output data
• SLAs
• Tracking spreadsheets
• Brief materials
• Campaign outcomes
• Project retrospective notes (post mortems)

With the right inputs, I have found it to produce a faithful representation of a change management plan.  However, it comes with issues.  To avoid some of these you can format your documents properly, here is a guide for that.

Reworking

It won’t be perfect out of the gate.  You will need to rework and workshop it, so make sure you are budgeting time for that.  A great way to do this is to ask the AI to write prompts for itself to rework the plan based on your feedback.  This tends to get the prompt written in a way that doesn’t get as easily misinterpreted.

If you are running into a lot of issues with misunderstandings, ask it to describe the information you uploaded to it.  Chances are that it misinterpreted something in here.  I have had that happen dozens of times, and it always surprises me the ways that AI can twist the meaning of a document… or even what the document is.

Pitfalls

Some change management plan is better than none, but know that there are pitfalls here.  This is kinda AI 101, but change management is an unfamiliar place for lots of folks, so common sense sometimes takes a back seat to urgency.

Taking the plan at face value misses a lot of important points.  It will give you more of an idea of what all you need to think about, but I recommend you consider the plan carefully.

Even with lots of support materials, you should still go over it and ensure it matches your needs.  It might have dredged something up in the support materials you didn’t expect, or worse, misinterpreted something.  It also tends to miss personal nuance.

Review all of its suggested communications. This is the most crucial piece, but if you are using it to draft broader communication, you really need to spend the time with it.  It is probably faster just to draft the comms yourself.

Conclusion

This was a hard one to write.  I don’t advise that this is the choice for managing your marketing orchestration change.  However, it is better than simply skipping change management altogether.  That is often what happens, too.  To be explicit: I recommend you get someone to talk to your team, evaluate your business problems, map out your current state, define your future state, and develop a customized plan to make the change while minimizing productivity loss.

But if you lack the time/budget/patience for all that, then I hope you take the advice listed above, it will help.  If you want to talk more about this, you can always reach out to us at acceleration@heinzmarketing.com.