Organizational Change Management for the Elections Modernization Project - VoteWA

Washington’s Secretary of State Elections Division was facing an unbelievably tight timeline to deliver a modern, highly secure new elections system before the 2020 Presidential Election. The agency knew success would depend on mobilizing stakeholders support across Washington State to give up their own tried and true information systems while the project team worked to simultaneously convert separate county applications to one new voter registration and elections management system in less than 11 months.

The Challenge

VoteWA project leaders realized the criticality of engaging their 230 geographically dispersed WA Elections staff members to support 4.5 million registered WA voters, and eight state agencies who manage 12 data interfaces that support voter registration and elections management. Elections across Washington were run on 42 separate legacy systems that were not integrated, and with some network components no longer supported, exposing system security vulnerabilities. Each county had their own separate system contracts and managed their own vendor relations for support. There were no standardized elections processes, no centralized oversight or governance, and no incentive for elections staff to collaborate across county lines.

What Was at Stake

Any Election Division’s information system security is absolutely vital to ensure voters can participate in a fair and accurate election. Under the current political climate, voters’ trust in the elections process could be further compromized if there was any negative publicity such as separate counties unknowingly sending multiple or different ballots to old and new addresses with no easy way to be aware of this occurrence, requiring extensive manual processes to compensate for the lack of integrated voting systems. Inadequate resources to implement a centralized statewide system could delay counties’ abilities to be prepared for to comply with new legislative mandates and overlapping elections activities throughout 2019 in the run up to the 2020 presidential election when unprecidented numbers of voters are expected to cast ballots.

The Solution

OTB’s organizational change management solution provided a customized systematic approach designed to increase stakeholder engagement, changing specific behaviors and fostering the culture needed for the success of this complex initiative.

The following deliverables were designed and implemented on behalf of organiational leaders, and engaging appropriate stakeholders throughout the processes:

A Comprehensive Organizational Change Management Plan including schedule and resource estimates, deliverables, risks & mitigation plans
Defined OCM Supporting workstreams, including Integrated Communications Plan, Organizational Readiness Assessment, System Training Plan, Go-Live Support, and Operational Governance Plan.
Web-based Organizational Readiness Assessment baseline and intermittent pulse checks to include survey administration, analysis and mitigation plans based on key OCM risk factors
Communications and OCM materials for project leads to present at annual State Auditors’ conferences, system training events including User Guide, and various presentation materials for Executive Steering Committee meetings and various state oversite bodies.

Results

As a result of implementing OCM plan components, the Elections Division was able to accomplish the following:

Drastically changed the organizational culture toward stakeholder engagement through implementation of predictable feedback loops between the project team, the central agency leaders and impacted county users
Typical participation in weekly stakeholder connection opportunities has consistently been between 45 and 75 participants on each call throughout the project
OTB Case Study Revised 11/20/2019 participants on each call throughout the project
Over 50 county users participated in super-user design and feedback sessions

Our project’s 3rd party quality assurance vendor commented that:

“This project should have failed based on how tiny the project team is, the huge scope of the project, and the unbelievably tight timeline. I’ve never seen such a high level of engagement from stakeholders on any project.”

Over 200 users (90%) participated in regional training, with 25 county users opting to become the peer trainers for concurrent three-day sessions at seven different sites throughout the state
Readiness assessment scores were cumulatively 39.2 points higher than their baseline score
OTB materially contributed to building leadership and change management capabilities within key stakeholder leadership team members, fundamentally changing culture across the agency.