The 7 keys to make change effective

The Environment of Change

The management of change environment covers a number of key dimensions. Each of these dimensions has the ability to enable more effective transformation (change) or, in its absence, seriously compromise a change initiative.

These environments (or “influencers”) are critical for the delivery of the following tasks:

Strategy

• Establishes the reasons for change.
• Defines the benefits that the change will provide the organization.
• Determines how the change will be delivered.
• Provides an understanding of the resources, cost, and time that the organization needs to commit to in order to deliver the outcomes specified.

Governance

• Provides a strategy to ensure that the change initiative stays on-course by specifying governance structure, people, process, channels/methods and frequencies for reporting progress.
• Provides the actual project governance flagged in the governance strategy.

Stakeholders

• Identifies all the stakeholders impacted by the project.
• Establishes what they want from the change initiative.
• Establishes what they don’t want from the change initiative.
• Determines how stakeholders want/need to be involved.
• Determines how and when stakeholders want/need project elements to be communicated.

Transformation

• Establishes a BRD (business requirements document).
• Delivers the BRD and it is approved.
• Monitors the post-go-live impact of the change.

Communications

• Determines with whom the project needs to communicate.
• Determines how (i.e., which channels) the project needs to communicate to stakeholders.
• Determines when the project needs to communicate to stakeholders.
• Determines what the project needs to communicate to stakeholders.

Training

• Determines what elements of the change require training.
• Determines who requires training.
• Determines what each type of stakeholders requires and what knowledge and skills need to be conveyed by the training.
• Determines how training is to be delivered.
• Develops the content for each training module for each type of trainee.
• Develops training schedule (who, where, when, what).
• Evaluates training to identify the level of “uptake” (i.e., the level of effective knowledge and skills enhancement).
• Delivers follow-up training to ensure “uptake” meets requirements.

Support

• Determines what aspects of the change initiative require support before, during, and after implementation.
• Determines the best way to deliver needed support.
• If relevant, determines the status of data that needs to be migrated to the new environment.

Actions

1. Review past projects.
2. For each project, identify within each which of the dimensions was not adequately or completely planned or considered.
3. For those projects missing any of the dimensions, determine the impact of that omission on the project’s performance.
4. Contemplate the implications of this assessment.

If you have or suspect negative responses to these questions, then your organisation’s change methods are not as clear as they need to be – and management is harder because of it – and your organisation’s results are probably compromised.

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We’re proud to advise that the authors of this piece are Advisory & Mentoring directors.