Most change practitioners are hired to support an initiative whilst others are supporting the business. Irrespective of the role, there are ways to be more strategic in managing change.
Here in this infographic we highlight the top 6 tips in being more strategic in managing change.
For the section on ‘Logic based approach to strategize change’, the MECE approach is mentioned. MECE stands for ‘Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive’. This is a technique used by strategy consultants to brainstorm and map potential solutions to solve a problem. To read up more about how to apply the MECE technique refer to this article.
It used to be that change management is the ‘poor’, neglected cousin of other disciplines in terms of access to functional software to assist in its performance. There is a wide range of software available for a range of project management disciplines such as, business analysis, testing, project management, portfolio management, etc. However, for change management the pickings have been almost non-existent 10 years ago.
Fast forward to 2022, there is now a handful of change management software in the market to assist with various work categories for the change manager. However, there is still ways to go in the understand of organisational change management in the marketplace. Compilations of change management software offering on the internet is usually a mixture of all types of software, many of which are not organisational change management in nature, and instead, technical change management (used by IT folks). For example https://orgmapper.com/change-management-tool/
How can change management software help the change practitioner?
Project change delivery
The vast majority of change management professionals in the industry are focused on delivering projects. It’s no wonder that most change management tools are focused to support project delivery as a result. What are some of the areas in which project change delivery work can be made easier by software?
1. Automating change management deliverable work
A significant part of the work of change management professionals is spent on preparing for and documenting change management deliverables. These include detailed impact assessment, learning plan, stakeholder matrix, etc. These deliverables are critical documents which are critical dependency for other project milestones. For example, stakeholder analysis and matrix is critical before broader stakeholder engagement can be made, since the analysis reveal who the stakeholders are and how they may be engaged throughout the change process.
One of the biggest pains faced by change management professionals is the amount of time required to manually create these deliverable documents. The work can be tedious, requiring weeks of manual work to complete. For example, the stakeholder matrix document can be a brain-numbing piece of activity, wading through a data dump of the organisational directory to determine every Tom, Dick and Harry which titles and names should be included in the stakeholder list for the project. Then, a lot of similar information then must be re-typed and entered into different versions in other change management deliverable documents such as detailed impact assessment or learning needs analysis.
Software can automate much of the manual work involved. For example, Change Automator allows the ability to link data already captured earlier on in the project, such as the stakeholder matrix, with other change management deliverables such as detailed impact assessment, to minimise manual re-work. Any data updated in one document, will therefore update content in other documents. This then saves on the tedious re-work required when data is updated or changes, which is pretty much a given throughout the project lifecycle. From a quality perspective, this also ensures any human-error is reduced in the data that should be synchronised across documents.
A common risk in change management delivery is that stakeholders may be left out inadvertently, or that a previously captured stakeholder in the stakeholder matrix is left out in the engagement process due to human-error. The impact of this type of error can be disastrous to the outcome of the project. Having cross-linked documents in one central place reduces the risk for this type of error.
2. Change management survey (readiness and adoption)
A key part of change management success is through careful monitoring of stakeholders throughout the change process. In the earlier part of the project, this involves understanding to what extent stakeholders may be clear of the objectives of the project, their roles in it, and general awareness. Later on in the project, it could be more on understanding their engagement level which can be a predictor of ultimate adoption and overall support for the change. This overall change readiness level should be monitored across the project through surveys or interviews.
Surveys are inherently time consuming to design, administer and report manually. Significant time can be taken throughout each phase of the survey process. This is a no-brainer in terms of using a software tool. Most projects use Microsoft Forms or SurveyMonkey to do the job. However, you may want more robust features such as conditional question design, for example, if a respondent answers ‘yes’ for not supporting the change, then an additional question pops up to ask why.
Surveys can include sentiment analysis where the focus of the survey is on any shifts in stakeholder feelings and attitudes toward the project. In this case, it is critical to define in detail the characters of each stakeholder group in concern. These would then determine respondent characteristics to measure in the survey design.
There are also tools that measure employee sentiments through corporate social media channels such as Yammer and Teams. For example, Swoop Analytics can help to measure collaboration styles and other behavioural insights about how employees interact with each other on those channels. The data map can reveal key influencers and core influential network connectors.
The biggest value of change surveys lies in the reporting. Most survey tools offer fairly simple reporting using bar charts or pie charts. For short, simple surveys these may suffice. However, if you are working on a fairly detailed change adoption tracking survey, more advanced reporting features may be required. You may want to easily change the colour scheme of the chart, change different chart types, identify anomalies and trends, or highlight certain parts of the data to make it easier for your audience.
Example from Change Automator
3. Project change reporting
Having the ease and flexibility of experimenting with different chart designs is critical for stakeholder impact. If you need hours of work to come up with a few charts the likelihood is that you will not bother. Some stakeholders may also have various personal preferences which can easily take significant time to modify. This is especially when you need the time to focus on engaging with your stakeholders, rather than tweaking excel spreadsheets.
Creating the right dashboard can create significant impact on stakeholders and help achieve your change objectives. Data speaks for itself and the right data visualisation can create memorable impact more than words alone. If you are driving toward change adoption, then having a dashboard of core behaviour changes and tracked capability shifts can act as a core part of change governance conversations. With a monthly cadence of reviewing these core data points, stakeholders can hold each other accountable to understand remaining work involved and zoom in on how to drive full change adoption.
Change reporting may not be limited to just survey results. Even seemingly ‘boring’ spreadsheet data such as detailed impact assessment may be easily turned into highly visual and interesting reports to help stakeholders understand what the changes mean and how different groups are impacted by the change.
One of the more popular ways in which change delivery has adopted software is in leveraging digital tools that provide functions to onboard or train users of new or changed systems. There are numerous providers in this area. These include WalkMe, UserGuiding, and Userlane.
Most of the tools provide similar functions to help walk users through interfaces of the system and even allow interactive experience where users can be tested in clicking on the right part of the system as a part of the training or onboarding process. The application is always for system interfaces since the tool only supports web-based systems.
Change capability
Another way in which change management software may assist change practitioners is in change capability. There are various tools that help to measure, track and report on change capability. It could be that you would like to measure the change leadership skills of leaders, change agility of stakeholder groups, or test employees as a part of skills assessment to ensure they have the right skills for the new system or process.
Using change management software, you can easily pre-program test items and answers to make it easy for yourself to score and tabulate test results without any manual work. You can also assign weightings to different questions to evaluate the capability of the respondent as a part of an assessment. You can even configure the assessment to provide results to the respondent at the end of the assessment. Generally, these features are only offered as a part of a learning management system where significant time and effort is required to prepare the system for the assessment. Now, digital tools offer easy point-and-click features, with pre-configured templates saving you significant time and cost.
Change portfolio management
Managing a portfolio of initiatives used to be an approach only adopted by more mature organisations. However, with the rapid pace and intensity of changes, more and more organisations are adopting this approach to manage multiple initiatives.
Managing a portfolio of initiatives can only be done via data. There is already a myriad of project portfolio management systems in the market to help PMOs and project portfolio managers manage a slew of initiatives. The focus of project portfolio management systems is on project timelines, cost, resourcing, etc.
Change portfolio management focuses on the impact of changes and how they may impact the organisation across initiatives. There is also focus on change delivery resourcing and change capability development. One of the most critical pain points faced by organisations is change saturation and change fatigue. To better manage a portfolio of initiatives from a change perspective and manage potential change saturation, data is required.
Effective change portfolio management tools can help you:
Identify and plot change saturation points for different parts of the organisation
Identify risk levels of potential change saturation across roles, locations, layers of the organisations, etc.
Assess to what extent changes may be better delivered as an integrated package to one part of the organisation, or broken down to smaller, more digestable chunks
Assess to what extent changes may be better aligned and delivered through integrated messaging from an impacted stakeholder perspective (vs. from project perspective)
Plan for change management delivery resourcing
Examples of change portfolio data visualisation from The Change Compass
In summary, there are many strong reasons why change management professionals should adopt digital change management solutions to achieve greater change outcomes as well as to automate the tedious parts of the work to gain time to spend with stakeholders. With the ever increasing pace of digitisation in organisations, change management must also follow suit in digitising itself. Just as we could use modern fabrication techniques to build skyscrapers that are stronger and more resilient vs using traditional brick and mortar, so should change managers in leveraging digital tools to support digital transformations.
Measuring behaviours as a part of change adoption is the ultimate measurement that change practitioners should incorporate as a part of tracking to what extent the change has been adopted by impacted stakeholders.
Whilst there could be a wide range of different behaviours depending on the initiative in concern, what are some of the tips in selecting the right behaviours to measure?
Check out our infographic on the top 4 elements to pay attention to when measuring behaviours as a part of change adoption metrics.
Change saturation is a common term used by change practitioners to describe a picture where there may be too many changes being implemented at the same time. The analogy is that of a cup with limited capacity, where if too much change is poured into a fixed volume, the rest will not stay in the cup or be ‘embedded’ as adopted changes.
At the end of 2020, Pivot Consulting conducted extensive research where they asked a range of different roles in organisations about implementing change. When questioned about key challenges to executing strategy and driving change, change fatigue or employees being overwhelmed by multiple initiatives is identified as one of the top 2 most critical challenges. It can be seen that change saturation is not just a popular discussion topic but a serious focus area that is posing significant challenges to a range of organisations.
Research from Pivot Consulting, 2020
There are many common ways of understanding and approaching change saturation. However, many of these are not always correct with some being quite misleading. In this article, we aim to review the 5 key incorrect assumptions about change saturation that are downright misleading and should be directly challenged. These may be assumptions that are widely held and assumed to be ‘facts’ and are not questioned.
Incorrect assumptions:
In the following, we outline the key assumptions that should be challenged when approaching change saturation.
1. Change is disruption
The first assumption is that change is always ‘disruption’. Change can be dynamic. There is also a range of different types of changes. Therefore, change does not always need to be negative and cause chaos or impede normal ways of working.
Take, for example, agile teams. A part of the work of an agile team is to drive continuous improvement. The team establishes regular routines to try something new, i.e. a change. They then execute it and examine the data to see the effect of the change on business. For these teams, ‘planned’ changes are just part of normal ways of working, and therefore not necessarily viewed as ‘disruptions’ to their work since this is part of their work.
On the other hand, change is also not always ‘negative’. Some changes may be there to make it easier for the employee or the customer. For example, it may be that the organisation is implementing system-driven automation to save employees time in entering manual information. These changes are typically welcomed by the impacted employees and are not perceived as ‘disruptions’ to their work. Instead, they are typically perceived as positive changes.
As a result, change needs to be understood by its specific impact on the various stakeholders, and not by its ‘disruption’. A more useful way to understand the impact of the changes on end stakeholders may be to understand the various activities required for them to undergo the change and shift their behaviours.
For example, it could be that a customer service rep may need to undergo training sessions, team briefing sessions, review documentation, and receive team leader feedback, in the overall change journey. These activities may be ‘on top’ of existing normal business routines, or they may be a part of existing business routines, and therefore not ‘adding’ to the ‘saturation level’.
2. Change capacity is determined by capability
It is a commonly held belief that change capacity is determined by change capability at individual, team and organisational levels. Yes, factors such as change leadership, individual change capability and skills can improve change capacity. However, change capacity is not only determined by capability.
Indeed, there are other factors that determine change capacity.
a. Biological.
Humans are designed to have a limited attention span. When there are too many things happening at the same time, we can only focus on a limited number of things at the same time. There are many studies that show if we keep switching focus between different tasks, we are likely to not have full focus and attention which will leave us to making mistakes.
This also applies to learning. The more we focus on multiple tasks, the more we are not able to tune out and therefore engage in deeper processing and learning.
What about thinking about multiple initiatives? According to University of Oregon researchers, professors Edward Awh and Edward Vogel, the human brain has a built-in limit on the number of discrete thoughts it can entertain at one time. The limit for most individuals is four. It does not matter how much capability development one focuses on, there is a limit to how much capacity can be created. Therefore, there is a cap on to what extent capability may lift change capacity. After all, no matter how skillful someone is, biological tendencies and restrictions remain.
b. Expectation.
The level of expectation of the extent to which one can change can determine the outcome. Studies have shown the individual negativity or positivity can impact the outcome. The more negative an individual of the outcome, the more negative the outcome becomes. However, if the expectations are unrealistically high, they may lead to disappointment.
Think back to the impacts of Covid, and how what would have seemed almost impossible in terms of virtual working has suddenly become a reality overnight. Often what companies had imagined taking 10 years to achieve, is suddenly achieved overnight out of necessity. The expectation that there is no other way and that there is no choice leads to the acceptance of the change scenario.
3. Basing saturation points purely on opinions
As change practitioners, we often aim to be the ‘people’ representative. Many think of themselves as the ‘social worker’ or ‘welfare worker’ who are there to be the voice of employees. Whilst, it is true that we need to be the voice of people, the definition of ‘people’ should not just include employees, but a range of stakeholders including managers.
Especially when the change environment is complex and challenging, there may be a tendency for people to ‘over-inflate’ the reality of the situation. Sometimes it may be easier to call out that there is too much change in the hope that this feedback will result in less change volume, thereby making work ‘easier’.
Change practitioners need to be aware of political biases or tendencies for people to report on feedback that is not substantiated by data. Interviews with stakeholders may need to be supplemented by surveys or focus groups to test the validity of the results. We should not simply assume that anything stakeholders tell us are ‘truths’ per se, especially since there is political motivation in biased reporting.
Example from The Change Compass – Plotting change saturation line against change impact levels
4. Focus on capability vs systems and processes to manage saturation
An overt focus on capability, knowledge and skills, may lead to gaps in the overall ability to manage change saturation. This is because skills and competencies are just one of many elements that supports change execution. Beyond this, effective organisations also need to focus on having the right systems and processes established to support ongoing change execution.
Systems and processes include such as:
Learning operations processes whereby there is a clear set of steps for the business to communicate, undertake, and embed training/learning activities. These include the right channel to organise people capacity to attend sessions, communication channels regarding the nature of scheduled training sessions and monitoring the effectiveness of these sessions
Communication processes include having a range of effective channels that promote dynamic communication between employees and managers, as well as across different business units and teams.
Data and reporting mechanisms to visualise change impacts, measurement on change saturation levels, and report on change delivery tracking and change adoption progress
Governance established to examine change indicators including change saturation, risks identified, and make critical decisions on sequencing, prioritisation, and capacity mitigation
Skills and competencies are one element, but without processes and systems established to execute the change and track/report on change saturation, there will be limited business outcomes achieved.
Outlined in this article are just 5 of the common assumptions about change saturation that are misleading. There are many more other assumptions. The key for change practitioners is not to blindly rely on ‘methodologies’ or concepts, but instead to focus on data and facts to make decisions. Managing change saturation needs to be data-driven. Otherwise, stakeholders may easily dismiss any change saturation claims (as is often the case with senior managers). Armed with the right data and insights, the change practitioner has the power to influence a range of change decisions to achieve an optimal outcome for the organisation.
An important part of measuring change is to be able to design change management surveys that measure what it has set out to measure. Designing and rolling out change management surveys is a core part of what a change practitioner’s role is. However, there is often little attention paid to how valid and how well designed the survey is. A survey that is not well-designed can be meaningless, or worse, misleading. Without the right understanding from survey results, a project can easily go down the wrong path.
Why do change management surveys need to be valid?
A survey’s validity is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Validity is an assessment of its accuracy. This applies whether we are talking about a change readiness survey, a change adoption survey, employee sentiment pulse survey, or a stakeholder opinion survey.
What are the different ways to ensure that a change management survey can maximise its validity?
Face validity. The first way in which a survey’s validity can be assessed is its face validity. Having good face validity is that in the view of your targeted respondents the questions measure what they aimed to measure. If your survey is measuring stakeholder readiness, then it’s about these stakeholders agreeing that your survey questions measure what they are intended to measure.
Predictive validity. If you really want to ensure that your survey questions are scientifically proven to have high validity, then you may want to search and leverage survey questionnaires that have gone through statistical validation. Predictive validity means that your survey is correlated with those surveys that have high statistical validity. This may not be the most practical for most change management professionals.
Construct validity. This is about to what extent your change survey measures the underlying attitudes and behaviours it is intended to measure. Again, this may require statistical analysis to ensure there is construct validity.
At the most basic level, it is recommended that face validity is tested prior to finalising the survey design.
How do we do this? A simple way to test the face validity is to run your survey by a select number of ‘friendly’ respondents (potentially your change champions) and ask them to rate this, followed by a meeting to review how they interpreted the meaning of the survey questions.
Alternatively, you can also design a smaller pilot group of respondents before rolling the survey out to a larger group. In any case, the outcome is to test that your survey is coming across with the same intent as to how your respondents interpret them.
Techniques to increase survey validity
1. Clarity of question-wording.
This is the most important part of designing an effective and valid survey. The question wording should be that any person in your target audience can read it and interpret the question in exactly the same way.
Use simple words that anyone can understand, and avoid jargon where possible unless the term is commonly used by all of your target respondents
Use short questions where possible to avoid any interpretation complexities, and also to avoid the typical short attention spans of respondents. This is also particularly important if your respondents will be completing the survey on mobile phones
Avoid using double-negatives, such as “If the project sponsor can’t improve how she engages with the team, what should she avoid doing?”
2. Avoiding question biases
A common mistake in writing survey questions is to word them in a way that is biased toward one particular opinion. This assumes that the respondents already have a particular point of view and therefore the question may not allow them to select answers that they would like to select.
Some examples of potentially biased survey questions (if these are not follow-on questions from previous questions):
Is the information you received helping you to communicate to your team members
How do you adequately support the objectives of the project
From what communication mediums do your employees give you feedback about the project
3. Providing all available answer options
Writing an effective survey question means thinking through all the options that the respondent may come up with. After doing this, incorporate these options into the answer design. Avoid answer options that are overly simple and may not meet respondent needs in terms of choice options.
4. Ensure your chosen response options are appropriate for the question.
Choosing appropriate response options may not always be straightforward. There are often several considerations, including:
What is the easiest response format for the respondents?
What is the fastest way for respondents to answer, and therefore increase my response rate?
Does the response format make sense for every question in the survey?
For example, if you choose a Likert scale, choosing the number of points in the Likert scale to use is critical.
If you use a 10-point Likert scale, is this going to make it too complicated for the respondent to interpret between 7 and 8 for example?
If you use a 5-point Likert scale, will respondents likely resort to the middle, i.e. 3 out of 5, out of laziness or not wanting to be too controversial? Is it better to use a 6-point scale and force the user not to sit in the middle of the fence with their responses?
If you are using a 3-point Likert scale, for example, High/Medium/Low, is this going to provide sufficient granularity that is required in case there are too many items where users are rating medium, therefore making it hard for you to extract answer comparisons across items?
Example of survey design interface and reporting from Change Automator
5. If in doubt leave it out
There is a tendency to cram as many questions in the survey as possible because change practitioners would like to find out as much as possible from the respondents. However, this typically leads to poor outcomes including poor completion rates. So, when in doubt leave the question out and only focus on those questions that are absolutely critical to measure what you are aiming to measure.
6.Open-ended vs close-ended questions
To increase the response rate, it is common practice to use closed-ended questions where the user selects from a prescribed set of answers. This is particularly the case when you are conducting quick pulse surveys to sense-check the sentiments of key stakeholder groups. Whilst this is great to ensure a quick, and painless survey experience for users, relying purely on closed-ended questions may not always give us what we need.
It is always good practice to have at least one open-ended question to allow the respondent to provide other feedback outside of the answer options that are predetermined. This gives your stakeholders the opportunity to provide qualitative feedback in ways you may not have thought of.
Writing an effective and valid change management survey is often glanced over as a critical skill. Being aware of the above 6 points will get you a long way in ensuring that your survey is designed in a way that will measure what it is intended to measure. As a result, the survey results will be more bullet-proof to potential criticisms and ensure the results are valid, and provide information that can be trusted by your stakeholders.
