Treating change
management deployment as a project
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Over the past several years, Prosci has seen a growing number of
clients work to deploy change management more broadly throughout
their organizations. Unlike project management, where the
competency can be built in to a select number of certified
practitioners, change management is a leadership competency that
lets organization be flexible and responsive to the market. The
ability to lead change is a competency that must reside in the
leaders and managers throughout the organization.
The task of building change management competency is not a small one, as becoming
competent at managing change surely is a cultural shift and
fundamentally impacts how people view themselves in regards to
change. From our experience, a change management rollout - or
what we call Enterprise Change Management (ECM) - is composed of
three elements:
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A common set of processes and tools for managing
change.
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A leadership competency at all levels of the
organization from supervisors to senior executives.
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A strategic capability that enables the
organization to be flexible, change ready and responsive to
marketplace changes.
With these elements in place, the organization achieves
higher ROI on its initiatives and has the foundation to be more
flexible and durable when faced with internal and external
pressures requiring change. But these elements take time and
focused energy to create. It is critical to view deploying
change management as a change and project that can be
managed.
Below, Prosci's ECM Deployment Process and ECM
Strategy Map provide structure to the project of change
management deployment. For organizations ready to take on this
challenge now, the ECM
Lab provides
an online, instructor-led program for building your strategy and specific
tactics. |
Prosci has a 3-pronged approach for helping you
deploy change management across your organization.
- ECM Vision - a one to two hour
conference call laying the foundation of
Enterprise Change Management (ECM)
- ECM Lab - an online, instructor-led
program for designing you deployment approach
- ECM Checkup - a final step to see how
your deployment has gone and audit your progress
Find out more at the
ECM webpage or
call 970-203-9332 to speak with an analyst. |
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ECM Deployment Process
The picture below shows Prosci's ECM Deployment Process, based on our
experience and research with organizations working to build their
flexibility and durability by deploying change management across their
organization.
Prosci's ECM Deployment Process
Vision steps:
1. Define future state
In the first step, you will develop the future state vision.
This stage helps you move out of your default or comfort zone to
really design a complete, holistic future state. While the
design may change as you move through the change process, this
initial step is necessary to know where you are going. It is the
task of describing what your organization will look like in five
years when it has built the competency to manage change.
2. Assess current state
There are characteristics of the current state - realities
of how your organization behaves - that will help or hinder your
change management deployment efforts. In this second step of the
process, you will examine these different factors, brainstorm
specific situations you face and conduct a gap analysis of the
current and future states. You will also investigate the engines
that are driving change and patterns in previous changes that
were successful, or perhaps unsuccessful.
Strategy steps:
3. Engage primary sponsor
Sponsorship will be a key to success. This step helps you
draw out the sponsorship coalition you will need to make your
deployments successful and provides guidelines for coaching them
through their roles and responsibilities. You will identify not
only who is the primary sponsor, but what other leaders are
needed to support change management deployment in their departments,
divisions or workgroups.
4. Form and prepare project team
The project team should be adequately resourced and
represent the main groups in the organization that are involved in applying change
management on an ongoing basis. Formalizing the team creates
accountability, responsibility and symbolizes the commitment of
the organization.
5. Select deployment strategy
The deployment strategy will be a blend of leadership,
project, skill, structure and process related tactics for building your organization's
change competency. During this stage you define the right strategy for
you. The ECM Strategy Map is presented in more detail below.
Implementation steps:
6. Build project
plan
ECM is a project. The project plan includes the specific
steps and activities needed to deploy a common approach through
your organization. It takes the tactics developed in the
Strategy Map and unfolds them over a timeline, with associated
milestones and deliverables.
7. Create change management plan
ECM is a change. The change management plan for ECM includes communication,
sponsorship, coaching, resistance management and training plans
to support the deployment efforts. One of the main challenges is
building awareness and desire around applying change management
- making the case for applying change management.
8. Create and present business case
The business case presents the whole story of why build
change management competency, including the financial
justification. Your need for and level of business case will be
specific to your organization.
9. Implement integrated plan
An integrated plan pulls together your project and change
management activities into an executable plan that shows
everyone in the organization what will be done to build your
organization's ability to change. it also includes activity and
future state measures.
ECM Strategy Map
A critical task of ECM is selecting your deployment strategy. Since building change management
competencies is a transformation that many in the organization must go
through, it is not enough to just offer training or have a
mandate from the top. To truly build the competency to manage change,
you need a holistic approach that takes into account how you can
create a shift in the way your organization responds to change.
Some organizations had attempted to deploy change management by
simply implementing it on many different projects. Others had tried to
deploy change management by introducing it into the training curriculum.
Prosci's approach was to identify the many different approaches being
attempted and try to make sense of these various tactics. The resulting
research and analysis produced the ECM Strategy Map that incorporates
these different tactics into a comprehensive model. The numerous tactics being used by organizations
were ultimately be grouped into five main categories:
- Leadership
- Project
- Skill
- Structure
- Process
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Leadership tactics
There are two elements of leadership tactics. First, there
are leadership tactics relates to getting
managers and leaders to fulfill their role as sponsors on the
initiatives they lead. Sponsorship has been identified as the
number one contributor to success in each of Prosci’s five
benchmarking studies. To build the competency to manage change,
acting as effective sponsors must become second nature for
senior leaders. Research indicates that this role include
actively and visibly participating on the project, building the
necessary coalition of leaders to support the initiative and
communicating directly with employees about the business reasons
for the change.
Second, sponsorship is required to support
the initiative called "building change management competencies".
Leadership commitment and support is needed across the
organization to begin applying change management on new
initiatives and build the individual competencies at each level.
While the initiative may reside in HR or IT or the Project
Management Office, a broad base of support is needed to truly
infuse change management into the business.
Project dimension
Change management is ultimately a tool that helps projects
achieve their objectives by addressing the human side of change.
Change management competencies in an organization require that
projects apply change management. To be most effective, change
management should be applied at the initiation of the project,
and the change management activities should be integrated into
the existing project plan. Specific tactics should be developed
for attaching change management to the projects happening in the
organization.
Some examples include setting a dollar threshold, so any
project over a certain investment level is required to create a
change management plan. You might also begin by applying change
management to a high profile project. Or, start with projects in
a particular department, division or geographic region and then
move across the organization. Whatever tactics, or combinations
of tactics, you choose the goal is to include change management
activities when you implement new projects.
Skills dimension
Skills is the dimension of the deployment strategy that many
organizations default to, and sometimes don’t ever get beyond.
Training in change management is a critical success factor in
building the organizational competency. However, it is only a part of the greater
system you will use to transform how your organization responds
to change.
There are numerous groups in the organization that need to
develop new skills and behaviors to support change management.
Since each person in the organization – from the CEO down to
front line supervisors – plays a role in managing change, they
need to be given the skills to do so. However, just because you
offer training does not mean you’ve built the competency to
manage change. The training must be positioned as part of the
overall transition and new organizational competency.
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Structure dimension
Structure relates to the organizational footprint left by
change management on the organization - answering the question
related to where change
management lives within the organization. Many organizations
create a group or department that owns the common process,
maintains the tool set and works on the continuous improvement
of the change management approach. This group may coordinate
training for others in the organization and track the progress.
The Change Management Office in this case is similar to
the Project Management Office many organizations are already
familiar with. It is important to remember though, that the people who are
‘doing’ the change management are leaders and managers
throughout the organization. There are many locations in the
organization where change management can reside, and selecting
the right place, along with the right level of formality of
structure, are important at this point.
Process dimension
The process element of the deployment strategy involves
selecting a common process for managing change. Just as
important, a standard methodology allows an organization to
develop common language and common terminology. Prosci’s
research shows that while some organizations have started
working to get change management applied to their projects, many
have not taken the next step of selecting a common approach. A
common change management process allows for faster learning,
more consistent application and continuous improvement.
Additionally, other efforts can be taken to adjust existing
business processes to include change management. For instance,
the project approval and launch process can be changed to
include an initial assessment of change readiness and potential
change management risks.
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Next steps:
In Prosci's most recent benchmarking study, we asked participants what they
would do differently on their next change management deployment. The
number two answer was to bring structure to the deployment initiative -
including planning, thinking ahead, understanding the current situation
and using a strategic approach. Prosci's ECM Deployment Process and ECM
Strategy Map provide the structure organizations need when they aim to
build their internal competency at managing change.
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Is your organization looking to deploy change management more
broadly?
Prosci has a 3-pronged approach for helping you
deploy change management across your organization.
- ECM Vision - a one to two hour
conference call laying the foundation of
Enterprise Change Management (ECM)
- ECM Lab - an online, instructor-led
program for designing you deployment approach
- ECM Checkup - a final step to see how
your deployment has gone and audit your progress
Find out more at the
ECM webpage or
call 970-203-9332 to speak with an analyst. |
