A light way of using Change Management tools
After looking at the main drivers of change in business, the types of change they generate and strategies to address their stakeholder needs, let us look in this article at examples of tools.
We will not paraphrase what you might find in other websites or articles, but rather share examples of our own work to show how we think some tools might help you.
Our first example is in the context of a change program aiming at reviewing R&D project management practices across departments. These are typically long and complex projects. The goal of the program was to improve collaboration and consolidate efficiently planning and status across departments. The program was already initiated for some time, but it was clear that some key stakeholders were dissatisfied by the progress made. To help get an objective overview and help the program manager make necessary changes, a simple diagnostic of this program was run to identify issues and propose solutions.
Main issues were:
- a lack of vision on the long-term goals of the program and too much focus on the project management tool without enough attention on project management practices themselves, for example the role of each team member of the project with respect to project management (input/output)
- poor teamwork resulting from unclear deliverables, planning, and responsibilities
- no systematic approach of change management: no stakeholder analysis, no incentives, no training plan
For each issue a number of ideas was proposed and we used the ADKAR model to check whether solutions were covering all aspects of the change and if we were missing any major one.
ADKAR looks at 5 aspects of change:
- Awareness: do people realize there is a need for change?
- Desire: do they want to change?
- Knowledge: do they know what they need to change?
- Ability: are they able to implement the change?
- Reinforcement: are they structurally encouraged to behave the new way of doing things?
Here are the solutions that were proposed for each issue:
- To address the vision issue, we proposed to formalize a program charter & roadmap, as well as running a performance assessment of current projects to confirm targeted business value of the program.
- To improve teamwork, we proposed to build a team charter to drive expected behaviors, implement Sharepoint teamsites as a repository of program deliverables but also of actions/risks/issues with a clearly assigned owner. We also proposed to formalize a communication plan and start a newsletter.
- To manage the change, we proposed to run individual stakeholder assessments, build a stakeholder management plan, build a training plan and formalize success criteria linked to performance appraisals.
Across issues we matched an ADKAR aspect with each proposed solution to check if we had the right “mix” for our change recipe. All aspects were covered:
- Awareness was covered by the program charter, communication plan & newsletter
- Desire was covered by the performance assessment at project level, team charter, the program leading by example- by showing usage of PM best practices- and the stakeholder management plan addressing individual stakeholder needs.
- Knowledge was covered by the program roadmap and the teamsite.
- Ability was covered by a 360° competency assessment leading to a training plan
- Reinforcement was covered by metrics on success criteria
Our second example is in the context of a move of an IT PMO towards a higher maturity level, moving from a support model to a more strategic role. At the time, there was an IT PMO consolidating budget and resource needs from a capacity perspective, but not yet delivering real demand management, and 2 PMOs providing support to individual complex programs. Here as well, a lot of effort was spent on the roll-out of a common project management tool. The initiative intended to align these components (the different PMOs) with a common mission & vision: focusing on demand management by aligning business & IT on business value, consolidating status information on projects and improving and standardizing project management practice among project managers to ensure project delivery is improved and the information is consistent to enable the right decisions.
After the mission & vision was agreed upon with senior management, we established a diagnostic of the change based on the Kotter model to enable concrete follow-up and to identify weaknesses to address.
Kotter looks at 8 major steps to go through in a change:
- Establishing a sense of urgency- why do we have to change now ? We needed to size-down the pipeline of projects to secure the delivery of strategic projects. In order to achieve this, we needed to improve the collection of performance metrics on projects such as delays, inaccurate resource allocation, etc. and align priorities between business and IT.
- Creating a guiding coalition – do we have strong supporters for the change ? To ensure strong support from senior management, we needed a regular meeting with the IT Governance committee to show issues and communicate/enforce individual improvement needs to project managers
- Developing a vision and strategy- Is what we want to change crystal clear and how we want to deploy it ? Also, what we do not want to change ? The mission, vision and roadmap was clearly articulated and validated by management.
- Communicating the change vision- are we sure people understand what they need to change ? The communication of the mission& vision still needed to take place formally.
- Empowering employees for broad-based action – are people able and ready to change ? We wanted to give full P&L responsibility to the project managers, (which was not the case yet), and include for all team members project-related evaluation criteria in the performance appraisal process.
- Generating short-terms wins – show quick results to build momentum/increased support. There were already pockets of higher maturity, allowing better visibility on project status and prevention of further delays.
The last 2 steps were not addressed yet at that time because we were at the beginning of the change:
7. Consolidating gains and producing more change – expand first success
8. Anchoring new approaches in the culture- making sure the change will remain after the initial deployment
Corrective actions identified above were then discussed to further accelerate change.
In this article we saw how to use change management models as checklists to implement your changes, to avoid missing any important aspect/ step of any kind of change. There are many more models available, but they all cover more or less the same ideas. Personally we have not followed any standard methodology to perform changes but rather use these tools informally to guide the approach which strongly depends on the organization and its context.
Would you like to share your own experience with us ?
