PVH Case Study

Human-Centric Organizational Change for a Future-Proof Tech Support

PVH is an American clothing company, owning brands like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. They are technological frontrunners in the fashion industry, piloting disruptive sustainability initiatives like the Digital Showroom. To drive innovation, PVH is constantly changing in terms of technology, process, and people’s behaviour.

Since 2019, PVH Europe’s Technology and Digital Sales departments worked with Neurofied on streamlining their way of working and driving change across the organisation. This case is the story of how PVH transitioned to future-proof Tech Support with Neurofied as organisational change management (OCM) partner.

“Neurofied joined the projects late and faced a huge challenge to lead organisational change. They made the difference by switching between operational and tactical contributions. Blending brain and behavior with practical application is the game changer. They managed to take people along on the journey. When the going got even tougher they stepped up to drive success.”

– Marius Boer, Head of Tech Support at PVH

Situation

The technological infrastructure for a global organisation like PVH is highly complex and the growing demand for digital assistance proved the need for future-proof Tech Support. This transition was kicked off with two major initiatives: partnering with a nearshore Tech Support service provider and migrating to new tech support software.

The scale of this change initiative was challenging: thousands of stakeholders in 25+ countries would have to change their way of working, learn to use a new tool, collaborate with a new team, and adopt new processes. The project group consisted of the PVH team, the new tech support partner, a technical implementation partner, and we focused on organisational change management.

Approach

As the OCM team, our role was to manage the people’s side of change. Our scope was both strategic and tactical with our projects ranging from stakeholder engagement and internal communications to driving adoption and tracking progress. The nature of this project required a process-driven approach while still keeping people at the center.

Critical success and failure factors

First, we defined critical success and failure factors with the project team, which we tracked throughout the project. Now that the end state and potential risks were clarified, we started meeting all related stakeholders. These conversations helped validate strategic assumptions and align with stakeholders’ way of working. They also served as valuable input for optimising the communication and adoption plan, providing the framework for embedding new processes and sending out 56 communication blips in four months.

Change Champions

By identifying dedicated change champions, we were able to co-create and implement behavioural science-backed interventions, workshops and trainings that maintain engagement and set the stage for lasting change. As with every large scale change, developing a clear vision with a narrative that drives it, increased confidence and motivation. 86% of the stakeholders involved indicate they trust the transition will bring PVH long term success.

“Starting my own journey as Service Delivery Manager at PVH, Neurofied helped me hit the ground running by providing the framework they’ve spent months building. By utilising interesting techniques and strong change implementation methods, we were able to figure out where we were having difficulties finding common ground with our new Managed Services Partner helping us improve the partnership.”

– Bart Visbeek, Service Delivery Manager at PVH

Results

To ensure adoption and long-term change, we provided PVH with three strategic deliverables for managing the transition:

In-depth stakeholder analysis
Deep empathy and understanding of your stakeholders is a key ingredient for successful change. Through a series of in-depth interviews, we mapped out how stakeholders are connected across the 25+ countries involved the change.

By creating clarity around the scale of the transition, we helped PVH ensure that all stakeholders were aware and prepared for the upcoming changes.
Communication strategy
Effective, consistent, and targeted communication is another key ingredient to success. Leveraging the stakeholder analysis, we created a change narrative and tailored it to different stakeholder groups to keep them informed at all times.

This resulted in a detailed communications plan containing newsletters, show & tells, AMAs, and info events across the organisation.
Change impact indicator
Before new ways of working, tooling, and processes can be implemented, it’s crucial to understand how the changes will impact different stakeholder groups.

By distilling input from key stakeholders, we created a change impact indicator containing detailed information on how changes will impact culture, behaviour, technology, processes, and governance for all stakeholder groups.

We used the change impact indicator to tailor change initiatives to different countries, groups, and departments, which enables lasting adoption and positive behavioural change.

New processes and ways of working are live and continuously optimised through feedback and co creation. For example, we set up a monthly alignment in which all key support teams identify problems and solve them collaboratively, that has since become a routine in their workflow.

But change doesn’t end there. As we hand the torch back to PVH, we make sure they are fully enabled to keep leading change with a toolbox full of behavioural science-backed strategies and tactics. Time to walk out of business as usual and learn to fly!