What is Change Management and how does it work?
What is Change Management?
“Change management is the discipline that guides how we prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive organizational success and outcomes”. With companies continuously changing to adapt to market growth, fix inefficiencies, and upgrade technology, support in change during these times is extremely important. Change management provides a structured approach to digital transformation that empowers leaders and employees to feel supported and heard during the implementation process.
What is the Change Management process?
We all know change can be a hard thing to do for some –change management focuses and introduces institutional changes in three phases so that a project manager or management can work through changes gradually. The methodology includes research-based assessments to support each phase, as well as guidance for completing each step most effectively.
So, how does it work?
Phase 1: Preparing for work
The first phase helps change and prepare teams for designing their change management plans. We probe our clients to think about questions like “what is the nature and scope of this specific change?” and what is the organizational context within which the change needs to happen. These two elements are critical to defining “How much change management will a specific project need” and how do we ensure that the organization is building on their capability. This means that each strategy and plan is tailored to the needs of both the project and the organization it is being implemented into.
Phase 2: Managing Change
The second phase focuses on creating plans that integrate with the overall project plan. The plans help articulate the steps in empowering and supporting your company’s people through their journey. Research indicated that there are a minimum of five plans that help support individuals moving through change:
1. COMMUNICATION PLAN
This plan articulates key messages that need to go to various impacted audiences. It also accounts for who will send the messages and when, ensuring employees are hearing messages about the change from the people who have credibility with them and at the right time.
2. SPONSOR ROADMAP
The sponsor roadmap outlines the actions needed from the project’s primary sponsor and the coalition of sponsors across the business. In order to help executives be active and visible sponsors of the change, we provide details on when and where we need leaders to be present, what communications they should send, and which peers across the coalition they need to align with to support the change.
3. TRAINING PLAN
Training is a required part of most changes, and is critical to help people build the knowledge and ability they need to work in a new way. The training plan identifies who will need what training and when.
4. COACHING PLAN
The coaching plan outlines how you will equip managers and people leaders to lead the change with their own teams. Managers play a significant role in aiding the change management efforts, but they need to be engaged as employees themselves first and allowed to work through their own change process. Then you can give them the information and tools to lead the process with their own teams.
5. RESISTANCE MANAGEMENT PLAN
The resistance management plan provides a strategy for both proactively and reactively addressing resistance. At the outset of a project, anticipated areas of resistance can be identified and proactively planned for specific activities targeted at potentially resistant groups. This can head off resistance before it becomes a problem.
Phase 3: Reinforcing Change
The third phase helps you create specific action plans to ensure the change in your company is sustained. Plans to recognize success, ensure alignment to success metrics and measure the rate of adoption, utilization, and proficiency of the new way of working are part of this phase and corrective action if success has not been achieved.
Interested in learning more about Change Management Services? Contact our experts today.
References: Prosci. “What Is Change Management?” Prosci, www.prosci.com/resources/articles/what-is-change-management.
Prosci. “Change Management Process.” Prosci, www.prosci.com/resources/articles/change-management-process.