Having delivered many Prosci Change Management Certification Programmes, I often get asked questions on the required skills or competencies from Change Practitioners. We often talk about HR skills, training skills and communication skills.
Indeed Prosci® Best Practices Research has identified four key attributes required from change management practitioners:
- Excellent communication skills
- Change management competency
- Flexibility
- Interpersonal and teamwork skills.
In addition, the following experience is helpful to their change management work:
- Business influence
- Commitment to the change
- Knowledge of the business.
Not only do Change Practitioners need the above attributes, they also need a solid change management framework. The Prosci methodology offers this and it is broken down into three phases, all designed with the objective of increasing proficient usage and adoption of the new capabilities being built by the project team for the benefit of staff:
Phase 1: Prepare for change
This is where you complete a large amount of internal analysis and preparation work. This includes:
- Defining your change management strategy
- Identifying your change management team
- Assessing your sponsorship.
The output of Phase 1 acts as input into Phase 2 where you Manage the Change.
Phase 2: Manage the Change
In Phase two you need to prepare 5 change management plans
- Communication plan
- Sponsor road map
- Training plan
- Resistance management plan
- Coaching plan
Each of these plans once completed, will translate into a set of tasks and activities that need to be managed by the change manager, even though other stakeholders will execute most of the actions within these plans. These tasks need to be completed on time, in budget and to the right level of quality. This in project management ‘speak’ is known as the triple constraint.
Phase 3: Reinforce Change
This is where we make sure that the change is sustained. We need to:
- Collect and analyse feedback
- Diagnose gaps and manage resistance
- Implement corrective action and celebrate.
These are very specific tasks and activities that will need to be planned, managed and tracked post change project implementation.
Project management tools for delivering change
Project managers make use of various tools to ensure they manage the triple constraint challenge of balancing time, cost and quality. One such tool is the Gantt Chart. Tasks and activities are documented in a Gantt chart to track the progress of the project.
Critically, change management activities need to be integrated into the overall project management plan and these tasks need to be tracked and managed, with any dependencies planned for in the schedule of tasks. Each task needs to have resources, duration and costs allocated.
Therefore to ensure success of the change, the change manager needs to ‘project manage’ these activities in their change management plan; and to do this successfully, the change manager needs to have at least some basic project management skills for change.
Developing Project Management skills to ensure Change Project success
Prosci can help you develop your project management skills for delivering successful change related projects. Our team has created a one-day Skills Builder for Change workshop, all focused around Delivering Project Results
This one-day workshop uses active projects to help project managers and change practitioners find a common language for successfully integrating change.
Using a robust online platform, this results-oriented session digs into the intent, objectives, scope, workstreams, milestones, deliverables and timelines of your project to help project managers and teams adapt to change and understand its benefits.
