It is the year of rabbit in the Chinese New Year of 2023. A quarter of the world’s population celebrates this. It is also the first year that a lot of countries are emerging from Covid and where there are little or no restrictions on travel and movement. People are travelling again and taking vacations. There is optimism in the air. Optimism that hopefully, the year brings better luck in health and economy for people a new year with hopefully less change and fewer disruptions.
With any Chinese New Year, there is a set of traditional customs that accompany the new year. These customs have developed over the years as people gather to pray, to gather, to celebrate, and to make wishes for the new year. For example, the customs of a family getting together to clean their house, having dinner, and staying u late on New Year’s Eve were formed in the Wei and Jin dynasties (220-420 AD). From the Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) entertainment formed including as firecrackers, dragon and lion dances, and lantern shows.
These customs have been formed to welcome the new and the good and remove the bad and the old. It helps to gear the families and communities to bring positivity in facing the new year. These rituals help people focus on the milestone and use it as an opportunity to reset and renew.
In running change projects, we also need to re-gear ourselves for the new year so that we ourselves are in the right head space and outlook to drive successful change in the new year. How might we do this? Chinese new year customs offer some useful suggestions.
Tip 1 – Getting the house in order
To prepare for the new year the Chinese clean their houses and surrounding areas as a symbol of sweeping out any misfortune and traces of bad luck. This is aimed to rid the house of back luck and misfortune of the past to open up the spaces for all that is new, including good luck.
Change practitioners should also follow suit to ensure that their change initiative is set up for success. Keeping the ‘house in order’ means:
Ensuring the documentation and data are optimised, easy to access, orderly, and can meet audit requirements.
Access to files is well organised and appropriate. Roles that no longer require access may need permission updates
The change team resourcing is optimised. Is there sufficient change resources to meet project requirements for the new year? How can resourcing be optimised? If the change management stream was asked to cut costs, what would be items to consider?
Tip 2: Visiting relatives and friends – or stakeholders
Another Chinese New Year custom is to visit friends and relatives. This is a way for people to bring good wishes to each other. Often these visits involve bringing gifts such as fruit and local products.
Change practitioners should begin the new year by meeting with various stakeholder groups. Bring positive thoughts and wishes to your meetings. Re-connect with your stakeholder groups to find out how their holiday period fared. This may be one of those few opportunities during the year where you’re able to connect to your stakeholders at a personal level by understanding more about their families (whatever form the family may consist of).
When you re-connect with your stakeholder groups, think about:
What are the new or changing needs of your stakeholders in the new year?
Which stakeholders do you need to spend more or less time with as a result of your experience last year?
Where are your stakeholders along the change journey? What else could help to speed up their adoption of the change?
What communication, engagement, and learning needs have worked well or not so well with them?
Typical Chinese New Year customs
Tip 3: Setting off firecrackers and fireworks – or re-highlighting the change
In the Chinese New Year, the firecrackers and fireworks are to create a festive atmosphere to welcome the new year. It is about creating the right environment.
In a similar way, change practitioners need to think about how to open the new year with a bang to re-orient their stakeholders to focus on the change. This does not mean setting off fireworks literally. But it means being clear about what communications and engagement tactics might be needed to create the right environment for people to focus on the change in the new year.
It may not need to be a communications campaign. Some ideas of what may work in organisations to draw attention to re-orientate back to the focus on the change:
An interview with the project sponsor
Town hall session
A social lunch or drinks session
Posters and cards
Emails about the focus for the year
Show-and-tell session about the holiday period
Tip 4: New year’s shopping – or update
People buy food and gifts for Chinese New Year for friends and family to celebrate the fresh new year. This also includes wearing new clothes as a symbol of good health and prosperity for the new year.
In a similar vein, change practitioners should think about what reset or update is needed for the new year. What has been learned from the past year which can be applied in the new year? Does the change approach need to be adjusted or tweaked for the new year?
What aspects of the change needs to be updated for the new year?
These might include such as:
New survey format or tool to allow the project to easily design conditional questioning to probe deeper into potential change readiness and change adoption blockers
Change messaging or positioning that may need to be tweaked to better resonate with particular stakeholder groups. Look at the data in terms of feedback, click rates, or viewership rate of communication materials as evidence
Change measurement system may need to be tweaked. Are you able to collect the right type and level of data to make critical change decisions? How should measures be altered accordingly to better suit the demands of the new year?
Leverage AI and automation to work more productively and deliver more value. There is ChatGPT which is wildly talked about that can uses to write content for all types of purposes. The Change Compass also offers a range of automation and AI tools to make your lives easier in delivering change
These are some of the ways in which change practitioners can practice traditional Chinese New Year’s customs and rituals and apply them to their projects. Customs have been formed over hundreds of years and exist to mark milestones collectively for people. They help gear us for the new year, to be better prepared, and to be in the right mindset. Moreover, they help us to have the capacity to be optimistic. Through optimism, we can welcome the new year with intentions toward successful change.
Creating a change management strategy is one of the most important pieces of work for the change management practitioner. Done well, it can drive the change initiative to success. If not crafted carefully, it can lead the project to its downfall even before the project starts. A good change strategy should be logical, fact based and clear. Yet, despite its importance it is one of the least understood aspects of the change management process.
A key pitfall for the change practitioner in devising a change strategy is to create one that is ‘cookie cutter’ and ‘generic’. Creating a generic change strategy is very easy, not because the change practitioner is lazy or is incompetent, but mostly because there is usually a standard and acknowledged ‘way of doing things around here’ in organisations.
Organisations are used to doing things in certain ways and this is often incorporated as a part of the ‘culture’. ‘The way we do things around here’ is often the impetus by which stakeholders reinforce the ‘status quo’ of implementing change in a particular way. This is because ‘this way’ has always worked in the past and is what people are used to.
What’s wrong with using the status quo you may ask? Well, sometimes it may be the best way, but not always. Why? Because not all changes are the same.
Changes come in all shapes and sizes, some are large multi-year transformations whilst others are small process improvements. There are also different types of changes, ranging from significant organisational restructuring, system implementation through to new product launches. Some changes may require highly structured, process-centric implementation method such as a regulatory process change. Other changes may be better with a more agile approach, such as transformation programs to improve customer centricity.
Rather than asking what the stakeholders think would be the best change strategy or approach, take a fact-based approach. If possible, refer to previously implemented changes as benchmarks or comparison yard-sticks. Ask your stakeholders how previously implemented changes fared against their respective change management strategies.
Key points of your research should include the following:
Size/Complexity of the change
Context/Type of change
Numbers of people impacted
Length of the project
Engagement and communication approaches taken
Stakeholder education and influencing approaches taken
Stakeholder responses and engagement levels
Lessons learnt and what worked or did not work
Research and data on what has worked in the past is crucial to your strategy
Taking a benchmark approach to developing a change strategy ensures that you take into account the facts of what worked and did not work. You also take into account differences in the change initiatives and how these could have impacted the change strategy taken and therefore the corresponding outcomes. Where possible, use change metrics such as stakeholder responses or survey results. These are powerful indicators of change outcomes against the strategies taken.
Most change management strategies are not strategies
If you review change management strategies devised across initiatives, you will find that most change strategies are not actually strategies, but a compilation of change tactics. These change tactics are a list of aspirational ‘philosophies’ that may be nice to have but there is no real way of knowing how these drive the project to success.
Let’s look at some examples of these change tactics.
Be transparent and truthful. This is a common used one, where the goal is to be as authentic and truthful as possible with the goal of gaining trust of impacted stakeholders. This means not intending to making the messaging overly positive, and erring on the side of being as realistic as possible. This may be hard to implement if Corporative Affairs or Internal Communications does not agree with this approach.
Involve stakeholders in designing the change. This is another popular aspiration for change initiatives. The thinking is to be as inclusive as possible to include a range of stakeholders in the design and implementation of the change, so as to maximise engagement. The more engaged targeted stakeholders are the higher the changes of change adoption success.
Strong senior leader sponsorship. Thanks to a wide range of books and literature touting the importance of gaining senior leader sponsorship, this is another common one. Yes, having senior leaders driving the change will go a long way toward ensuring change outcome success. However, this in itself may not be sufficient. Again, depending on the type of change it maybe better to have a bottom-up, grass roots approach, rather than a top down approach.
All of the above change tactics may seem sound and logical. And they probably are. However, the whole point of a change strategy is not to list out a set of tactics, principles or philosophies. There could be a very long list of seemingly logical tactics. It also may not be possible or realistic to commit fully to every tactic.
Change strategy is about deciding what top few change approaches will be taken that will directly drive the most initiative success. This means that the change practitioner must start with the project targets and objectives. These should be as black and white indicators. For example, increase customer satisfaction by 10%, increase efficiency by 20%, or increase customer responses by 40%.
Now that you have identified the project targets and objectives from the project manager, you now need to identify change management requirements. For example, to increase efficiency by 10%, the project needs to ensure that the customer service representatives follow the new process 100% of the time. To do this, the project may need to design a series of audit and system notification processes to reinforce this behaviour. From a change management perspective your requirement could be ensuring that the report is built into and discussed by the relevant leaders and teams. Also, that the performance scorecard for concerned roles have built in these metrics.
Let’s take another example. To increase customer satisfaction by 20% the project needs to ensure that frontline agents know how to have the right type of conversations with customers. The change management requirement could be to instil continual coaching and feedback to drive continual skills uplift that is based on competency ratings. The Change strategy would then be driving competency based uplift.
High level example of a change management strategy
In this way you can see that each part of the change strategy directly contributes to reaching the project targets. The direct contribution of each change strategy can then be evaluated in terms of its contribution importance.
So now you know how to devise a change strategy that directly contributes to the goals of the project. Your change management work should be geared around driving this strategy. And the contribution of your work should be clear and explicit. It should not be brushed aside as a ‘nice to have’ or too ‘soft and fluffy’.
If you want to learn more about creating the right change management metrics, visit The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Change.
Creating the right change management strategy is an important step. Even more important throughout the implementation of the project is how you monitor and adapt to the challenges that come your way. Change strategies may need to be tweaked or revised depending on the data you’re seeing along the way. To find out more about how to leverage data to resolve the most challenging questions during your change journey chat to us about how The Change Management platform can help.
In this Change Practitioner Q&A Series we interview change practitioners to find out more about how they approach their work.
A bit about Alvaro …
Alvaro is a change and program management professional, with experience in diverse industries, from Energy & Utilities, Education, Tech, Professional services, and Financial Services. He has worked across programs in transformation, technology, restructures, risk, regulatory, and culture.
Change Compass: Hi Alvaro, describe yourself in 3 sentences
Alvaro:
Personally, I tend to be cheerful and optimistic.
Professionally, I’m quite driven. I love to play a big part in complex pieces of work, being accountable for end-to-end delivery.
I like to “zoom in and out”. Diving into particular task detail, and also being clear of its value in the organisation, community, and society as a whole.
Change Compass: What has been the most challenging situation for you as a change practitioner? Tell us what happened and how you fared through it.
Alvaro:
The evolving nature of the change role and therefore the expectation on me as a practitioner. The definition of “change practitioner” is subjective across industries, teams, and projects; and thus, the “role” is not necessarily tied to a “title”. I’ve experienced this multiple times on projects.
Consider the overlap between the change analyst and business analyst roles, or between a change manager and a project manager. Since change management is not an isolated function, but rather is embedded across various teams, roles, activities, and artefacts (e.g., implementation plan), it’s not always easy to clarify roles and responsibilities. And this overlapping becomes more blurred when you add Agile ways of working/methodologies, product management, human-centred design, etc, which reminds me of The Change Compass articles on the role of Change Management in Agile.
These situations may be problematic if people in the team believe change management is an isolated function, or limit the practitioner to a particular methodology, potentially leading to “step on toes” situations – which I’m sure your readers are familiar with.
To overcome this, in the short term, I’ve spent time ensuring clarity of roles and responsibilities. Sometimes, this requires peer education on what change management is, which might even lead to some tough conversations. However, we should at least try to agree on common ground.
In the long-term (and I think we are heading there), industries, communities of practice, and professionals overall should move away from resourcing based on “titles” to evaluating “skills”. For example, rather than requesting a PM and a Change Lead, let’s think about the skills required for the management of such a piece vs the volume of expected effort.
Change Compass: What are the most critical and most useful things to focus on when you first start on a project, and why.
Alvaro: I would say three things:
1) Data: From PMO/CMO, find out about the product, service, and industry… but to start, obtain an employee list with information on location, business areas, and roles. This will allow you to dissect the organisation to understand the complexity of each area, and how to best plan your engagement. All you need is the basic understanding of organisational design, and pivot table skills.
2) Governance: Change professionals are usually not accountable for this, but we should definitely be a part of it. It makes a difference when roles and responsibilities (from business sponsor to the intern), communication, and approval channels are clear. This includes agreed ways of working. I don’t mean unnecessary formal documentation or undesired and draining team-building workshops. A visual representation (accessible for contributors) with one or two conversations should suffice.
3) Project documentation as a product: Clear, honest, diligent, and accessible documentation on what you are working on, feeling comfortable to disclose the work in progress. If you treat your project documentation as a great product for your stakeholders (from the beginning), you’ll save a lot of time for them and yourself (and they will love you for it).
TIP: Look at the collaboration tools at the company. Some are better than others, I strongly recommend Confluence.
Change Compass: As change practitioners, we don’t often get to stick around to see the fruits of our labour, but from your experience what are the top factors in driving full change adoption?
Alvaro:
Discuss with your team and business owners the expected adoption and embedment outcomes from the beginning, including how they will be measured.
Include a decent timeframe within the implementation plan for adoption and embedment work (before and after Go Live). Do not squeeze this within “hyper-care”.
Understand the embedment systems at the organisation (if any). This may include existing forums, regular surveys, champions, and team leader/supervisor conversations within the business. Instead of creating “new” sessions, you can agree with the business to leverage these.
Adoption & embedment documentation tends to be a “tick the box” exercise. Those supervising change within organisations need to be more outcome-oriented, rather than auditors (checking if the change manager completed “x” or “y” artefact). This will promote a focus on the quality of delivery, over a focus on the completion of documentation. For change managers, it means moving from “I’ve done the embedment plan” to “I’ve co-designed an embedment plan with the stakeholders”.
Change Compass: You’ve been known as great at managing tough stakeholders. What’s your secret?
Alvaro:
The honest yet boring side of it is that I actually enjoy conflict resolution. Years back, I used to work at a restaurant and my peers would always ask me to resolve a situation with a tough customer. It doesn’t sound like helpful advice, right? Well, I guess my take is: practice conflict resolution! You may understand it but it gets better with experience. Other things are:
• Empathy: You never talk to a “title” (e.g., Executive Manager), they are a person, with a life behind their job. • Transparency: Don’t play politics… it’s 2022 at the time of this article. Be yourself and say what and how things are. • Vulnerability: Geez! This one is so important. Admitting you (or what you represent) might be wrong (or can be better) is extremely powerful. Build trust by being human.
Change Compass: If you could alter the change management practice for the better, what would you want to see happen?
Alvaro:
I would love to see a focus on skills, not titles or fixed “change methodologies”. This also includes seeing change as embedded across roles, artifacts, and activities, not as an isolated function.
Skills for a change practitioner must include strong project management, as well as data analysis to drive decisions in engagement, overall timing, and measurement. This includes companies using integrated tools to understand change across the organisation, as well as change practitioners understanding how to leverage them.
Finally, change management institutions and communities of practice must push to better integrate change management within project management methodologies. For example, as part of Prince 2 or Safe Scrum. There’s no need for a “change role”, but many aspects are missed (or unclear).
Change saturation is talked about as one of top key challenges facing organisations as the pace of change is dialled up. The pace of change has been increasing for organisations and does not show any evidence of slowing down. Several surveys have indicated the seriousness of change saturation for change practitioners and senior leaders. This includes several Prosci surveys that have indicated the importance of change saturation for a large percentage of companies. There is also plenty of articles that focus on change saturation.
But why is change saturation happening and what is the cause of it? Why is it not talked about in the past and why now?
Pace of technology change
We can see all around us that the pace of technology change is speeding up. In the 1980s most people did not have access to the computer. Now there are computing features and devices on our bodies, on our laps, on our desks, at every shop and office, etc. In fact, it is hard to think of a world where these features are taken away from us. Not just Generation Z, but most of us in other generations would also agree.
The role of AI and machine learning of late has driven significant investment and change in organisations. This involves the power of AI to improve productivity and carry out existing work tasks at a significantly improved quality and pace than was previously imaginable. There are not many large organisations that are not leveraging this as a competitive differentiator.
Pace of innovation
Though technology has driven massive change at an increasing speed in impacting our lives, a key call out on top of this is the pace of innovation. Technical changes are only valuable if they are used by people. The ability for us to apply technical advancements to a wide range of human needs is what creates innovation. Techology firms are constantly looking for ways to improve the human experience. Now, we are seeing this driven by hundreds of millions of startups around the world. This is the latest force that challenges existing ways of doing things to reinvent and improve existing business models and improve how we work and live.
Culture lag
“The term cultural lag refers to the notion that culture takes time to catch up with technological innovations, and the resulting social problems that are caused by this lag. In other words, cultural lag occurs whenever there is an unequal rate of change between different parts of culture causing a gap between material and non-material culture.” (Wikipedia).
Some organisations and industries are running faster to take up, transform and reap the benefits of change. Technology firms tend to move fast and used to significant transformations in business models and ways of working. Other organisations may be less effective and change at a slower pace. Even within organisations, some departments seem to be faster at adopting change than others. The organisational culture differences can be quite stark. The leadership capability, the mindset, hierarchy structures, the operational processes, levels of agility and work approach all make up the cultural behaviours between the haves and have nots.
This is what differentiates successful organisations compared to those who are less successful … the ability adapt and change quickly to keep pace.
Large companies are by design siloed
Large organisations are by design a series of siloed departments. Depending the organisation structure it could be that each department is a separate kingdom with very different cultural traits and ways of working than other departments. Or, it could be countries that are operating differently. It could also be vertical or functional lines of grouping employees that shape the way people work.
Yes, there are ways in which large organistions can be designed to be less siloed. For example, through having the right operating and alignment processes across departments and teams it is possible to reduce this silo. Centres of excellence groups can act to connect disparate functional workers across the organisations without a formalised reporting structure. For example, Business Analysts that may sit in different departments. Having the right town halls or sharing forums can also help to share the work across a large number of teams. Some multinationals are particularly good at doing this to share best practices and reduce waste.
Irrespective of how large organisations are structured, for most, initiatives are driven by project teams. Each project team has its own challenges, stakeholders, budgets, timelines and business pressures. By design each project team is a silo. If there are 50 projects in an organisation then there are 50 silos. Even if all project teams report to one division, for example a transformation office, there are still challenges in ‘integrating’ the work across projects.
Now you can see why large organisations are really feeling the pinch in change saturation. With the increasing speed of industry and technology changes come an increasing number of changes in the organisation. The increased volume of change as well as increased speed of change results in the feeling of change saturation in employees. Sure, improved change capability can help in some situations in the uptake of larger volumes of change. However, people capacity is limited and there is only so much human change bandwidth within any given time.
Examples of data visualisation from The Change Compass
The power of data in addressing saturation
Having a good initiative portfolio management system may help to connect the dots from a portfolio and project management perspective. Data provides visibility and shows the true picture of what is happening, allowing visualisation of what were only felt, into logical and precise factors of the what, why and how of the changes.
However, portfolio management systems only tend to focus on the picture from a project perspective. This includes:
Project costs
Project timelines
Project resourcing
Project benefits and tracking
However, what changes mean to the business and the organisations is a very different picture than what it means to project/transformation teams. The picture for the ‘receivers of change’ versus the ‘drivers of change’. Having a robust picture for the drivers of change (PMO, senior leaders, project teams, etc.) is critical and necessary. But it does not inform the organisation of what the journey looks like for employees to undergo the various changes in the organisations.
The picture of the ‘receivers of change’ is the picture that is required to examine if there is change saturation, the extent of it and what to do about it. This includes data such as:
People change impact volume, severity, timeline
The who, when, how, what of people change impact
Type of people impact, whether employee, customer or partner impacts
Most organisations do not collect these types of data. Some change management teams manually create heatmaps to support this. However, they only capture a portion of the data listed above. Also, these are highly manual and usually not sufficiently robust to support the level of detailed required in business decision making on prioritisation and sequencing.
There lies the dilemma for large organisations. Significant amounts of investments are made in transformation. Significant benefits are anticipated. However, research shows that a lot of transformation efforts do not reach anywhere close to their targets. With increasing volumes of change, orchestrating the system across initiatives is key. And the missing link is in the people impact component to power the success of transformations through data.
By utilising digital means of capturing, farming and visualising change impact data, organisations can solve a range of business problems linked to change saturation. Data can inform and predict:
Employee sentiments toward change
People capacity
Operational performance
A number of project, business and benefit risks
Change adoption and progress tracking
Opportunity for better prioritisation and sequencing of releases
Using machine learning and AI it is possible to derive a range of powerful insights into key risks and opportunities that organisations may be facing with change. Risks linked to business performance and capacity challenges is usually top of mind for companies as a mere few percentage points drop in performance could mean tens of millions of dollars in value lost. The other important factor is risks and opportunities linked to benefit realisation across the initiative portfolio. With the right orchestration and sequencing balance, the overall initiative benefits can be optimised.
Measuring change is not just an activity, it is about achieving a change outcome. The particular outcome can range from understanding how ready stakeholders are for the change, how change mature they are, whether they have adopted the change, or whether they have the capacity for change. Achieving this change outcome is not just about selecting the right measure or collecting the right data. Even after analysing the data and interpreting the results, there is a number of steps required to achieve the targeted change outcome.
In the first part of ‘The Ultimate Guide to Measuring Change’ the focus is on outlining the various areas in which change may be measured. These include initiative-based change management measures such as training evaluation or communications effectiveness. Non-initiative-based change management measures include change leadership assessment, change saturation assessment or change maturity assessment.
In this part 2 of the same topic, we focus on the various steps involved in achieving your change outcome when you embark on your change measurement exercise. So, you have already selected the change management measures. You know how the measurement works and how to collect the data. What next?
Dashboard design
Developing a good dashboard can make or break the success of your initiative. A good dashboard draws the attention of your stakeholders to the right areas of focus and can prompt action. As your stakeholders receive ongoing feedback on how the measures are tracking in the dashboard, this provides them with evidence of whether any actions they have taken have influenced the measures.
On the other hand, a badly designed dashboard can be overwhelming, difficult to understand, and most importantly do not prompt the right attention and action required from stakeholders. In this case, the dashboard may be skimmed over by stakeholders and not taken seriously. This is absolutely what we want to avoid.
Some key considerations in designing dashboards
Focus on the critical few. More is not better when it comes to dashboard design. The dashboard should comprise of key measures that tell a good picture (not necessarily a thorough one) of what is happening and if things are on track. For example, if you would like to present a readiness dashboard, key measures could be:
Overall readiness score
Readiness by business unit
Readiness by roles
Training completion rates
Yammer chat trends
2. Determining visual formats in your dashboard. Not all data visualisation formats are created equally. Some tend to be harder for users to understand than others. Overly colourful charts can also distract the user from focusing on what you want him/her to focus on.
A key question you should always ask yourself is ‘can the audience understand what this chart is showing in 5 seconds without context’. This makes it challenging, right? This is exactly what we need to aim for to make it easy for the audience.
3. Create a balance of different types of measures that, in total, capture core aspects of what the audience would like to find out about. For example, in the above example, there is a balance of measures such as surveys, stakeholder ratings during meetings, completion rates and trend analysis.
Your dashboard could also have a mix of visuals from charts, figures, quotes, insights, and data tables. It does not always need to be in the form of charts alone.
4. Experiment with different types of visuals and see which ones are the most appealing in terms of generating insight and action from your stakeholders. Depending on the stakeholders you work with, some data visualisation formats may not resonate as much as others. So it may take experimenting to figure out the most impactful set for your particular stakeholders.
5. Allow the user to drill through the data, where possible. When you present the dashboard to your stakeholders, this will naturally prompt a series of questions and discussions. Essentially, by allowing drill-through of the data, you are answering questions around ‘why’.
Common questions include what data comprise this component? Real examples could be ‘why is this business unit not ready for the change’, ‘why is the training completion so low for last month’, and ‘why are stakeholders not confident about our overall readiness’. To facilitate queries such as these, it is always very helpful to be able to click into the data points that comprise a particular chart.
6. Your dashboard should form an overall picture of the story you are trying to tell on a regular basis. Designing any dashboard requires you to be clear about the key story you are trying to tell to your stakeholders. Some potential stories could be:
We are slowly getting ready for this change, but not quite there yet
Certain business units or roles are finding this change challenging and ongoing support and engagement is required to overcome their potential resistance
We are incrementally making headways to engage the impacted employees, but some are more engaged than others
We have not made significant grounds in our change maturity, though we are laying the right foundations to support the shift
7. Automating dashboard data collection. If you are running a less complex initiative or in a smaller organisation it may make sense to resort to Excel to create dashboards. Many also use Tableau or Power BI. However, both can be quite technical and would require time and effort to set up and use. Experts in Tableau and Power BI within the organisation may likely be pulled into multiple demands already. Leveraging off-the-shelf data visualisation platforms such as The Change Compass may provide a way to save significant time to enable plug-and-play options for complex change environments. In this case, no expert knowledge is required to set up or maintain dashboards.
Making recommendations
So you’ve selected the change management measures, created the dashboard, and allowed the ability to drill-through the data as needed. The most important next step is to prepare your recommendations. You already have the what, the why, and now it’s time to answer the ‘so what’. This is the part where you deliver your biggest value and make recommendations to improve the current status.
There are several things to consider in making your recommendations:
The recommendations should be very logical and a natural extension of the metrics and results you’ve presented. It should almost be a ‘no-brainer’ for your stakeholders in your recommendations. On the other hand, if your recommendation is not substantiated by the metrics you’ve just presented, or there is data missing, your stakeholders may easily challenge the basis of your recommendations.
Practice writing out the reasoning for your recommendations to test its deductive and logical reasoning. Break this down into a step-by-step series of premises in which you can analyse and ‘prove’ the recommendation where possible.
For example:
The Finance department has the lowest training completion rate
Many participants from Finance commented that they did not understand why they are doing the training.
There seem to be more questions about the initiative from Finance employees on Yammer
The number of engagement sessions held in Finance is lower than in other departments
Overall readiness scores for Finance are also lower than other departments
Workload in Finance is not high during readiness survey nor during the training rollout
The last employee engagement surveys showed that Finance employees had lower engagement scores than other departments
Your recommendation: Interview select Finance employees to understand why they are less engaged. Since it’s unlikely due to workload, it may be due to leaders not putting the time and focus to engage employees about this initiative. As a result, there is less engagement in the Finance department. So the premise that needs to be tested is if the lower engagement is due to Finance leadership not engaging the group about the initiative.
The key call out here is to be able to sequence together a series of deductions that lead to the recommendation. Each data visualisation shown is a step in this deduction that leads the user to agree with your recommendation.
3. Your recommendation must be actionable, and helps to move the needle toward improving the change outcome. It should not be just a hypothesis, a conclusion or worse, an opinion. It must be something that can be acted on by someone. For example, a set of actions to remediate the change engagement, to motivate leaders to resolve employee resistance, to celebrate success with the team in the current progress, etc.
Ensuring data integrity
There is nothing worse than standing in front of your audience and being challenged by the data you are presenting because of data integrity. If you are caught in the position of presenting data that is not accurate then you may only have a small window of opportunity to salvage your reputation. To avoid this, ensure you have done your homework on the integrity of the data.
There are several things you can do in ensuring data integrity:
Look for patterns that may not make sense. There are many ways in which you can easily zoom in on potential errors by checking:
Variance from previous data, e.g. Is there an unusual deviation from previous months’ report that may not make sense in terms of engagement scores?
All data points have been updated, e.g. Are you missing any survey data from particular business units? Have all initiative impacts been updated?
Patterns that may not make sense, e.g. You would have expected that Marketing would be the less change ready but the data suggests they are on-par with other business units. This may prompt additional investigation
Drill-through significant findings to check that it makes sense. E.g. The bar chart shows that March has the highest impact level on the business. Drill into March data to double-check that this matches the observation and that it is not a chart error.
Regular data audits. If your dashboard will be presented every month, aim to start auditing your data at least a few days before the presentation to leave enough time to do any follow-up on chasing the right data.
Send your dashboard to a ‘friendly stakeholder’ whom you can confide in without being challenged or critiqued. Ask the stakeholder for feedback to check if there is any glaring error and if the data makes sense.
Storytelling
Having a set of metrics presented in a dashboard is exactly what it is … a set of data. It may be presented in a way that is easy to read and easy to understand. However, the purpose of dashboards is so that they can be presented and discussed so as to facilitate regular monitoring and decision-making. This means that to really get the full impact out of the dashboards you need to be able to tell compelling stories that will grab the attention of your stakeholders and motivate them into action.
If you are making a full presentation, then you may want to follow the following sequence:
1. Key summary of findings and recommendations
This is the Barbara Minto pyramid model of starting with a quick summary of all your points including recommendations to quickly grab the attention of your audience. After this, they will be clear in terms of what you will be talking about in your segment. This is a form of executive summary and is very effective for senior executives who may have a low attention span and can easily get lost in the details.
2. Key findings and insights
Walk through your key findings and insights. Ideally, stick to no more than 3 major points. This is because with too many points the audience is unlikely to remember them and may be lost in the details. If you have a lot to talk about, group them into themes so that this makes it easy for your audience to understand and remember. Again, aim for no more than 3 themes if possible.
3. Why – substantiated by data
This is probably the hardest part to facilitate because it is likely that your audience may want to dive straight into the details of the data and start to ask all kinds of questions. You may want to guide the conversation by telling the audience exactly the flow of what you will be going through to minimise any major disruptions in your storytelling.
Avoid overwhelming your audience with too much data. A part of your storytelling is to balance having just enough data to support your observations and lead them to agree with your recommendations in the next step.
Balance discussion with your overall storytelling flow by allowing time and space for reflection and questions. To maximise engagement, prompt certain members of your audience to see if the data resonates. This can add weight to what you are presenting.
4. Recommendations
If you are making a regular update at a recurring meeting such as a monthly planning meeting, committee meeting, or change governance meeting, then this could be the sequence that you will be following. In this context, you may have limited time to highlight key observations and may not have enough time to dive into the details of all the data. The focus is for a short and sharp call out of key findings, highlighting data that supports your observations, followed by a logical set of recommendations that are action-based.
This is the sequence for your presentation for updates:
Key findings and observations
What is new and different since the last meeting, or what trends to note
Why – substantiated by data
Recommendations
Change governance
It would be great if you can easily leverage existing meetings and business routines to incorporate your charts and dashboards so that they can be used. However, it could be that existing meeting chairpersons do not currently see the value or that there is no current meeting that could serve this purpose. Getting the value out of your dataset means that you need to think about the overall system of change governance.
If you are working in 1 project you can leverage existing project reporting rhythms such as monthly meetings for business stakeholders or meetings with impacted business units, project team and the project sponsor. If you find that certain important stakeholders may not have a way to receive this information or that they should be involved in decision-making, you may need to work with your project manager and project sponsor to address this gap.
Ensuring that your change metrics are used in the right change governance forums may take time to influence. Often the ‘gatekeeper’ of the forums may not be focused on change management and be reluctant to provide additional agenda within an already crowded meeting.
To influence and get your metrics in the key decision-making forums, depending on your organisation, try influencing these key stakeholders:
Portfolio manager/PMO
Project managers/project sponsors
Senior leaders from impacted businesses that see the value of your change metrics
Business planning/Strategy managers that may be able to leverage your change data for better planning
Risk partners who are responsible for influencing the business. They may be particularly interested in risk-in-change
HR business partners who may be concerned about people capacity, engagement, and sentiments
Building capability in change analytics
Not all of your stakeholders will understand the data you are presenting straight away. Especially in the beginning, it could take a bit of time to induct them to what the data is showing, how to interpret it and the significance of the data. Some stakeholders may want to spend most of the session critiquing and diving into the details of the data. Others may want to focus on parts of the data that are not what you want them to focus on. Or, it could be that they need more coaching and support to decipher what the dashboard is telling them. Be aware and ready to pre-empt and guide the flow of the conversation.
To build the capability in change analytics within your organisation:
Start by calling out the fact that you are presenting a new set of data and that you will be focused on spending time to support the audience in understanding and interpreting the data in the beginning
Use your business rhythms and regular meetings/committees to start your meeting segment by walking through step by step the art of interpreting the data
Provide coaching or drop-in sessions for a broader set of stakeholders to provide guidance as needed
Create an intranet page for the program or portfolio where stakeholders can access the data and ‘self-help’ in building their change analytics capability
