Designing a Change Adoption Dashboard: A Guide for Change Managers

Designing a Change Adoption Dashboard: A Guide for Change Managers

A good change adoption dashboard can make or break the full benefit realization of a change initiative.  It captures the essence of what stakeholders need to focus on to drive full change adoption.  This visual representation of the status and progress of a change initiative provides real-time data and insights into how well-impacted employees are adopting the change and what steps can be taken to improve adoption rates. In this article, we will outline the steps for designing an effective change adoption dashboard.

Change adoption is often only measured toward the end of a change initiative.  This is a mistake since the adoption journey can start as early as the project commencement, or when stakeholders start hearing about the initiative.  At a minimum, change adoption should be defined and agreed upon before significant change impact happens.  If you are implementing a system this will be well before the system go-live.

These are the key steps in building a great change adoption dashboard.

Step 1: Define the Objectives of the Change Initiative

The first step in designing a change adoption dashboard is to clearly define the objectives of the change initiative. This includes understanding what the change is, what it aims to achieve, and what the desired outcomes are. Understanding the objectives of the change initiative is critical to defining the metrics that will be used to measure adoption and success.

If your initiative has a long list of objectives, be careful not to be tempted to start incorporating all of these into your dashboard.  Your task is to pin down the most critical change management objectives that must be met in order for the initiative to be successful.  If you are really struggling with how many objectives you should focus on, aim for the top three.

Step 2: Identify Key Metrics

Once the objectives of the change initiative have been defined, the next step is to identify the key metrics that will be used to measure adoption and success. These metrics should be directly tied to the objectives of the change initiative and should provide actionable insights into the progress and success of the change.

Some examples of metrics that can be used to measure change adoption include:

     

      • Stakeholder engagement levels (depending on your stakeholder impacts these could be customer, employee or partners)

      • User adoption rates

      • Process improvement metrics

      • Time to adoption

      • Feedback from employees

    The key is to locate the few metrics that will form the core of what full change adoption means.  As a general rule, this often means a behaviour change of some kind.  Here are some examples.

       

        • If the goal is changing a business process from A to B.  Then you are looking for employees to start following the new process B.  Then, identify the core behaviours that mean following process B.

        • If the goal is to start using a new system, then you would focus on system usage.  Also focus on tracking any workarounds that employees may resort to in order not to use the system.

        • If the goal is to improve customer conversations, then you would focus on the quality of those conversations using key indicators.  This may involve call listening or customer satisfaction ratings.

      Again, ensure you are not over-extending yourself by picking too many metrics.  The more there is, the more work there is.  Having too many metrics also lead to attention dilution, and you start to loose stakeholder focus on the more critical metrics compared to less critical ones.

      In the group of metrics you’ve chosen, if there is no behaviour measure then it is likely you may have missed the most critical element of change adoption.  In most cases, behaviour change metric is essential for any change adoption dashboard.

      If your change process involves too many behaviour steps, then focus on ones that are easier to track and report on.  In a system implementation project, they could be system usage reports or login frequency.  


      Examples of target behaviours as a part of behaviour change

      Step 3: Choose the Right Visualization Techniques

      The next step in designing a change adoption dashboard is to choose the right visualization techniques. The visualizations should be chosen based on the data that needs to be displayed and the insights that need to be gained. Some examples of visualization techniques that can be used include:

         

          • Bar graphs: to display changes in metrics over time

          • Pie charts: to display the distribution of data

          • Line charts: to display changes in metrics over time

          • Heat maps: to display the distribution of data on a map

        Selection of charts can be technical, and your goal is always to choose the right type of chart to make it easier for the audience to understand and interpret.  Minimise on having too many colors since this can be distracting and overwhelming.  Use colours carefully and only to show a particular point or to highlight a finding.  Choosing the wrong chart can mean more questions than answers for your stakeholders, so choose carefully.

        Visit our article ‘Making Impact with Change Management Charts’ to learn more about data visualisation techniques.

        Beyond just having a collection of charts, modern dashboards have a mixture of different types of visuals to aid easy stakeholder understanding.  For example, you could have different data ‘tiles’ that show key figures or trends.  You may also want to incorporate key text descriptions of findings or trends in your dashboard. Having a mixture of different types of information can help your stakeholders greatly and avoid data saturation.


        Example of chart styles from The Change Compass

        Step 4: Design the Dashboard

        Once the objectives, metrics, and visualization techniques have been defined, the next step is to design the dashboard. The design should be intuitive and user-friendly, with the ability to drill down into the data to gain deeper insights. The dashboard should also be accessible to all stakeholders, including employees, managers, and executives.

        Data visualisation is a discipline in itself.  For a general overview and key tips on chart design and selection visit our article to learn more about data visualisation techniques.

        To reduce manual work in constantly updating and producing the dashboard for your stakeholders think about leveraging technical solutions to do this for you.  A common approach is to use excel spreadsheet and PowerBI.  This may be feasible for some, but it often involves using a PowerBI expert (which may come at a cost), and any time you want to change the dashboard you need to loop back the expert to do it for you.

        The Change Compass has incorporated powerful and intuitive dashboarding and charting features so that you do not need to be an expert to create a dashboard.  Reference our templates as examples and create your own dashboard with a few clicks.  


        An Example of a Change Adoption Dashboard from The Change Compass

        Step 5: Test and Refine the Dashboard

        The final step in designing a change adoption dashboard is to test and refine it. This includes testing the dashboard with a small group of stakeholders and getting their feedback. Based on their feedback, the dashboard can be refined and improved until it provides the insights and data that stakeholders need to drive change adoption.

        A key part of this step is testing any automation process in dashboard generation.  Is the data accurate?  Is it recent and updated?  What operating rhythms do you need to have in place to ensure that the process flows smoothly, and that you get the dashboard produced every week/month/quarter?

        Step 6: Continuously Monitor and Update the Dashboard

        It is important to continuously monitor the change adoption dashboard and update it regularly. This will help to ensure that the dashboard remains relevant and provides the most up-to-date information on the progress of the change initiative.

        The reality is that stakeholders will very likely get bored with the same dashboard time and time again.  They will likely suggest changes and amendments from time to time.  Anticipate this and proactively improve your dashboard.  Does it drive the right stakeholder focus and conversation?  If not, tweak it.

        Good stakeholder conversations mean that your stakeholders are getting to the roots of why the change is or is not taking place.  The data presented prompts the constant focus and avoids diversion in that focus.  This is also a journey for your key stakeholders to find meaning in what it takes to lead the change and reinforce the change to get business results.

        Summary

        Designing an effective change adoption dashboard is a critical step in ensuring the success of change initiatives. By providing real-time data and insights into how well employees are adopting the change, a change adoption dashboard can help key stakeholders make informed decisions and take action to improve adoption rates.  Ultimately it is about achieving the full initiative benefits targeted. By following the steps outlined in this article, change managers can design a change adoption dashboard that provides the insights they need to drive change adoption.

        Building and executing a change adoption dashboard can be a manually intensive and time consuming exercise. Leverage technology tools that incorporates automation and AI. You will find that this can significantly increase the speed in which you are able to execute on not just the change dashboard, but driving the overall change delivery. For example, you can leverage out-of-the-box features such as forecasting and natural language query to save significant time and effort.

        Have a chat to us about what options there are to help you do this.

        Four Chinese New Year customs you can adopt to improve your change outcome

        Four Chinese New Year customs you can adopt to improve your change outcome

        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.

        Most change strategies are tactics.  Here’s how to do it better.

        Most change strategies are tactics.  Here’s how to do it better.

        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.

        Change practitioner Q&A series: Alvaro Pacheco

        Change practitioner Q&A series: Alvaro Pacheco

        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).

        Why change saturation is a pandemic for most large organisations

        Why change saturation is a pandemic for most large organisations

        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.

        To read up more about managing a change portfolio, check out our article The Ultimate Guide to Managing Change Portfolio.

        If you would like to discuss more about how to leverage digital solutions to solve change saturation risks click here.