You've identified the need for change within your organisation, but what next?
To maximise the success of your change project, it’s important to lay a solid foundation before building the framework. To ensure you’re fully prepared, we’ve collated a few vital steps you should take to build a customised and scaled change management strategy.
Identify change characteristics
Every change is unique in its size, complexity and the scale of disruption it causes to established ways of working. We need to understand that. A number of different factors need to be taken into account before you can expect employees and senior members of staff to come on-board.
First, you should quantify:
- Scope of the change
- Number of individuals and groups impacted
- Type of change
- Amount of change required
- If the timescale to deliver the change is realistic
From this, you can begin to build your change management strategy.
Assess the organisation
Some organisations will already have everything in place to effectively implement change throughout the business, while others remain resistant to change. When assessing your organisation's readiness to accept and adopt your change, it is important to quantify the following organisational attributes, among others:
- The organisation's adaptability to change
- Current level of change saturation (how much more change the organisation can absorb)
- Residual effects of past changes
Quantifying these and other attributes will enable you to understand how the organisation is likely to respond to your change project, so you can execute the right scale of change management effort, targeted in the right areas of the organisation, to reduce the risk of your change failing to be adopted.
Analyse audience impact
Your proposed change will impact employee groups and departments differently. Some may experience it as a high degree of change while others experience it as only a minor change. It’s important to view each group within your organisation as unique and identify their challenges to successfully adopting the new ways of working caused by your change. You should assess:
- What type(s) of change will be felt by the different impacted groups and to what degree?
- How many employees are in each group?
- What unique organisational barriers exist for each group (i.e. past experience with change or leadership challenges)?
Interested to discover more? Become a certified change management practitioner with CMC Partnership Asia!
Our next Prosci Change Management Practitioner courses run from November 7th to 9th and from November 27th to 29th.
As well as becoming certified, this 3-day course will equip you with the essential toolkit needed to effectively implement change.
Click here to find out more.
