Aligning process and technology is all about trying out the new technology before you ask your change community to adopt it. For technology organizations this is about user acceptance testing and piloting, for non-technical change this is about piloting or gaining feedback on your approach before rolling out to the larger group.

“This is about playing out your change to ensure that it works for the people you’re hoping will employ it, and that they have the best possible first impression. Our job is to try it out with representatives of our change community to be sure that the new behavior or activity is in its simplest and most effective form. This practice minimizes barriers, anticipates misalignment of rewards and consequences, and also gives us an opportunity to gain important feedback about how we can improve on our approach and delivery.

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When we’re working with a process change that is supported by technology, we do two things to support the alignment of technology and process. The first is to work with our business stakeholders to define business scenarios and technology requirements. Later, we build test cases that support the business requirements so we can effectively ensure that the technology supports the intended process outcomes. The best testing is aligned with relevant business process scenarios and performed by representatives of our user communities so that they can give us rock-solid feedback.

Example of how a Test Plan with Scenarios can align with a curriculum map, and a survey example to evaluate how effectively a particular feature set serves the desired process.