Thought Leadership Articles

    3 Steps for Approaching Enterprise Change Management

    Oct 27, 2023 | Posted by Rhys Tompkins

    With the increasing pace and importance of change, the ability to "out-change" your competition is rapidly becoming an essential core competency for the majority of organisations. To successfully build your organisation's change management capability so that you are agile in responding to change opportunities  you must treat and manage the effort of becoming organisationally change competent as a project and a change itself. Leading organisations around the world are deploying Prosci's Enterprise Change Management (ECM) approach to embed change capabilities into their organisations.

    Increasing your organisational change maturity requires a root and branch examination of your current way of working and a structured and intentional multi-year plan to improve them. Creating this kind of truly agile organisation, one with high change maturity, one which can adapt to and exploit change opportunities, requires enterprise change management.

    In this blog we'll cover: 

    To help you get started, we've outlined 3 steps you should take when approaching the subject of enterprise change management within your organisation:

     

     
    1.  Build a case for Enterprise Change Management

    Developing a business case for enterprise change management (ECM) is one of the most powerful vehicles for presenting the rationale and approach for change management, needed to overcome some of the most common objections or challenges. Many fail to truly understand the benefits and value it can bring to the organisation. And securing support for change management if you are unable to connect the people side of change to what leader’s care about – results.

    A powerful business case should explain the rationale of change management in the appropriate context,  explaining how we will realise benefits. Remember the prize of high enterprise change maturity is big; according to Prosci's research organisations with the highest level of maturity experience 65% of their projects delivering their expected business results, compared with the lowest level change maturity organisations who only have a 37% project success rate.

    Within your ECM business case you should shift the conversation away from “change management is missing on this project” and towards “to get what we want out of this initiative, people have to change how they do their jobs”. Demonstrate the value to current business changes of building upon your organisation's change management capabilities. 

    Download: Why Building Enterprise Change is a Smart Investment 

    Why Building Change Capability is a Smart Investment (2)

     

    2.  Clarify the difference between Change Management & Enterprise Change Management

    Change management is defined as: "the process, tools and techniques to manage the people side of change". It involves understanding the change that is being implemented, analysing the people that will be impacted by the change and creating the plans and actions that will help drive the successful implementation of the change from the people-perspective (such as communications, sponsorship, training and resistance management).

    Enterprise Change Management is different - it is the deployment of change management or the building of change management competencies across the entire organisation. Enterprise change management ensures that change management is done effectively on all projects and changes throughout the organisation. Effectively communicating the difference won't only help to highlight the benefits enterprise change management will bring but can avoid confusion and any resistance which may come as a result.

    Download: Building Enterprise Change Capability with Project ECM

    Building ECM-1

    3.  Train Your Team

    When looking to introduce change management as a core competency throughout the entire organisation, take the time to up-skill internal stakeholders and managers so they have the ability to deploy organisational-wide change management best practices with practical tools and techniques. This will equip senior leaders, line managers and employees so that they can better handle the increasing volume and pace of change to their ways of working. 

     

    Interested in developing Enterprise Change Management Capability in Your Organisation?  

    Our Enterprise Change Management (ECM) Boot Camp teaches you how to enhance your organisational change management capability.  Our interactive, online, Prosci instructor-lead programme is concentrated on how to best internalise change management practices.

    The workshop is available both through public open-enrolment and to be delivered privately for organisations.

    It is suitable for Change Management professionals, leaders and Directors of Change Management. Get in touch to find out more about dates, options for your organisation and/or how to book.

     

    Topics: Enterprise Change Management