Measuring change has become increasingly popular within the change management discipline. It used to be that change practitioners were more comfortable thinking and proposing that they are all about people, and therefore people factors are not hard and easy to measure. Areas such as change leadership, training, communication, and engagement were often the key tenants of a change professional’s key focus areas.
With increasing digitisation and focus on data and metrics, change management is also not exempt from this trend. Business leaders are now demanding that change management, just like most other business disciplines, demonstrate their value and work outcome through measurable metrics.
Using change management software to measure change
Even before the more recent trend of focusing on various aspects of change, change management software products have emerged. 10 years, when the basic idea for The Change Compass started, there was only 1-2 change management software in the market. Several years after that, there started to be 2-4 product offerings emerging in the marketplace.
Over the years, many of these software products have closed shop, or been sold to other companies. At the time, the need for change management software to measure change was not strong in the marketplace. It was perhaps an immature market where a lot of practitioners saw little need.
Types of change management software
There are many types of change management software. First, let’s spell out that we are not talking about technical change management software such as ITIL or technical change tracking software. The focus of this article is on organisational change management software.
The different types of change management software include:
Change project adoption measurement – Such as ChangeTracking that focuses on measuring the extent to which the project is progressing on track from a stakeholder perception and adoption angle
Change project implementation measurement – Such as Change Automator that provides a platform to automate project change delivery work that change practitioners focus on in capturing change deliverables, and overall change reporting and tracking
Change portfolio measurement – Such as The Change Compass that offers data visualisation for a change portfolio (collection of change projects) to help make portfolio level decisions on prioritisation, sequencing and delivery risks
Other organisational measurement – Such as OrgMapper that provides organisational network analysis maps and networks to understand relationship networks across individuals and groups
Data capture and automation
One of the key value propositions of a digital change management software is to provide some levels of automation in the capture of change management data, so that the data may be easily analysed and visualised. However, in our analysis of available change management software in the market, we found that there is a wide range of various levels of automation. Some have almost zero automation, whilst others have significant levels of automation.
In searching for an effective digital change management tool, ensure that you take into account the following in data capture:
To what extent is the data capture flexible and can be easily tailored
What are the system features to automate data entry?
Is there a range of data analytics from the data entered
Is the tool just a data depository without insight generation and data analysis features
Is the data capture too categorical? E.g. Agile vs Waterfall? And how useful are the data fields in terms of making decisions or generating insights?
Here is an example of automation from Change Automator where stakeholder data can be pulled from the company’s Microsoft Azure system to reduce the significant time required to input stakeholder details.
Change Automator example of using automation to save time
Data analysis & reporting
The power of digital software is that it can easily calculate, track, and visually show the metrics that we are focused on. Looking at raw data is meaningless if it cannot be turned into highly engaging and meaningful charts that generate an understanding of some kind of insight into the organisational situation with regard to initiatives.
Some change management software reports simple figures that may provide limited usefulness. For example, the number of impacts affecting each stakeholder group may be interesting but there is not much we can do with the data. This is because the number of impacts doesn’t indicate the overall severity or volume of the impacts.
Data visualisation should also support ‘drill-through’, where the user is able to click on the chart and drill into more details about that particular part of the data to better understand what contributes to it. This is a critical part of data analysis and understanding the story that the data is telling us.
Effective data visualization
Data visualisation formats are also critical. With the wrong data visualisation design, it becomes very difficult for people to understand and interpret the data. Ideally, the user should see very clearly what the data is showing them visually. For example, pie charts have become very popular in reporting. However, pie charts are only useful to contrast a few different data points. When there are too many data points and the data is too similar, the human eye finds it difficult to compare and contrast any differences.
Effective data visualisation should also allow the user to highlight a part of the data to create a visual emphasise to support a particular point. Making the visuals simple for the user is ultimately the most important part of chart design. The more complex it is, the harder it is for you to get your point across to your stakeholders.
To learn more about designing the right data visualisation to create optimal impact check out our infographic.
Insight generation & decision making
Ultimately, the change management software should be designed to provide insight into what is going to happen to the impacted people (whether it be employees, customers, or partners). The data should help you zoom into where is the source of the problem or the risk area, what the risk is, and potentially how to make a recommendation to resolve it. The drill-through capability is critical to support the insight generation.
The data visualisation should also directly support you or your business stakeholders to make business decisions on change. If the data was just ‘interesting’ it will not have much impact and after a while business stakeholders will lose their interest in the data. Instead, data and reporting should form a core part of regular business decision-making. Decision making using change data can be:
Within a project in making roll out and implementation decisions
Within a portfolio in making prioritisation and sequencing decisions
Within a business unit in making capacity prioritisation, business readiness and operational planning decisions
Across the enterprise in PMO and change governance settings on prioritisation, sequencing, benefit realisation and enterprise planning
Tailoring of data visualization
For those users who are more advanced with change analytics, there may be stakeholder requests to tailor charts in different formats. It could also be that for a specific organisational scenario, the user would like to create a tailored chart to show the specific problem that is not represented in existing off-the-shelf report designs.
In this case, the software should have the flexibility to allow these users to select their desired data fields and even types of charts that they want to work with to design the tailored chart without too much effort, and ideally not from scratch.
Here is an example from Change Automator where the user is able to easily tailor a chart by selecting the data fields, experiment with different charting, to come up with the ideal chart to influence stakeholders.
Example from Change Automator on easily tailoring charts
Trend analysis and predictive analysis through machine learning
Reading and interpreting individual charts can yield significant insights. However, the real power of analytics is to look at historical trends and even predict future trends based on data. Therefore, having the right data, over time, can create significant value. This is why investing in data is so critical, and why not just technology companies, but most industries are focused on digitising and leveraging the power of data.
The same thing applies to change analytics and change data. Invest in change data and the benefits can be enormous. By better understanding data trends with the assistance of machine learning, the system can highlight and draw your attention to critical observations and findings that you may have skipped.
With sufficient data, you’re also able to utilise machine learning to generate predictive data trends. Some examples of situations in which this can provide significant value include:
Typical times in which the business unit or team are busy with changes or operational challenges
Typically how initiatives of different complexities take to adopt and embed within the business
Typical delays in forecasted versus actual change implementation timeline
Stakeholder groups that tend to show the highest resistance or lowest engagement to initiatives
Predicted time it takes to realise targeted benefits
Investing in a change management software can create significant value for your organisation by measuring change and making it visual and easier to understand. Selecting the right tool is critical since there is a variety of options on the market. Examine closely the functionalities and how they enable you to make business decisions since not all charts may be useful. With the right software support, you will be able to not only tell a compelling, data-backed story of what is going to happen to the business, but also the logical recommendations that stakeholders find hard to dispute.
Change Automator example of leveraging machine learning in change analytics
Being more strategic in managing change is about being more focused on those aspects of driving change that will create the most value for the organisation. This is directly comparable to what strategy is about. Strategy is about choosing a particular path to achieve a particular set of goals, versus other paths. There are many paths and many ways to manage change and different paths may yield different results.
What are the advantages of being more strategic? Being more strategic means you are clearer in terms of the specific approach you are taking in leading change and how that translates to a particular set of results. It is not just about following a particular methodology blindly or whatever approach is ‘in vogue’.
Strategic change practitioners create greater value for the organisation. They are more able to connect with senior managers in terms of driving organisational impact and results versus being focused just on individual implementation tactics. They are also able to easily articulate why change activities are carried out and how they contribute to the overall outcomes. Moreover, they’re able to position the value of the change in the overall strategy of the organisation and why the change is important. In approaching the implementation they zoom in on the parts of the change that makes the most difference.
How does a change practitioner be more strategic?
Start with understanding and linking the initiative to the strategy
Every initiative exists to support a particular strategy that the company has created. Change practitioners need to have a good understanding of the organisational strategies, why they were created, and what they aimed to achieve. At a basic level, it should be clearly understood by all stakeholders why the initiative was created and the strategy it aims to support.
A clear grasp of how the initiative supports an organisational strategy helps the change practitioner position the size of the value delivered by the initiative. As a result, it helps with determining the focus and effort that should be devoted to and how to realise the objectives of this initiative.
Organisational strategy can also be understood using the 3 horizons model. Strategies and initiatives can fall within each of the 3 horizons.
Horizon 1 ideas provide continuous innovation to a company’s existing business model and core capabilities in the short-term.
Horizon 2 ideas extend a company’s existing business model and core capabilities to new customers, markets, or targets.
Horizon 3 is the creation of new capabilities and new business to take advantage of or respond to disruptive opportunities or to counter disruption.
3 horizons model (from Stratechi)
Most change practitioners would be involved in horizon 1 initiatives where there are immediate changes required to the business in the shorter term. However, there are also initiatives about transformation in horizon 2 concerned with building core capabilities. Horizon 3 is about building and launching new products or launching into new markets outside of the existing business. There may also be initiatives within this horizon. Understanding which horizon the initiative falls under helps with its positioning.
Improving business acumen:
Having good business acumen is critical to being a strategic change practitioner. If you do not understand how the business works then it is hard to be strategic. This is because without understanding key drivers of how the business works, it is hard to formulate the right positioning to support the change initiative in a way that supports the realisation of the strategy.
Don’t fret. There are a few focus areas that can point you in the right direction.
1. How the company makes money.
At a basic level, understand how the company is structured and how it makes money. Lay out all the various departments of the organisation. Focus on key operations of the business. This can be labelled as a value chain, or how services and products get produced and delivered to the customer. What are the key investments of the organisation? In a financial services setting the focus is on people, financial investment, and technology. In manufacturing, it could be on equipment and supply chain.
Focus on the key drivers for the company. Is the company focused on maximizing profit? Or is the focus on increasing revenue? Is there a focus on decreasing costs to increase revenue? What are the ‘big buckets’ in which cost savings can be achieved? And therefore how is your initiative supporting any of these drivers?
The critical part is to understand ‘why’ the company is focused on particular activities. There are the business-as-usual parts of the organisation focused on maintenance of the business (’keeping the lights on’), and then there are core drivers that can make or break the business and its financials. Seek to understand why particular strategies were chosen and what objectives they will help the company to achieve.
2.Competition and the market landscape.
After understanding how a company operates, the next step is to understand the landscape that it operates. A good model to be familiar with in analysing the competitive landscape of the industry is Porter’s 5 forces model. Seek to understand the interplay between the 5 forces. How do these shape the industry? As a result, how is the company positioned in the market? To be successful which forces is the company focused on managing?
Is your initiative involved in providing a better experience for customers because the landscape has been changing and customers are more demanding and have more choices than before? Is the initiative focused on launching a digital solution so that the company is not overtaken by rivals who offer better options to customers? Is the company’s profit suffering due to increased material/finance costs and therefore the initiatives are focused on containing cost? Is the program focused on improving efficiency through launching a systems solution and therefore improving customer delivery time or saving headcount?
5 forces model (from Visual Paradigm)
Focus on providing value to the organisation
We know that it is not always easy to prove the value of change management. People benefits are not always tangible and easily measured. However, this does not mean that it is less important or that measurement is not valuable. In the past, there have been efforts to try and measure change management in terms of return on investment (ROI). However, this may not be the most strategic way of demonstrating the value of change management.
Where possible, always focus on creating value for the organisation, as opposed to focusing on saving costs. The ultimate superpower of change management is about creating the right organisational environment so as to fully realize the benefits targeted by initiatives. Initiative benefits may not always be in financial dollar terms but are often in the hundreds of thousands to millions in benefits.
On the other hand, a focus on cost will always be compared against other costs. You can try and argue that the cost for change management is not large, but then there are always ways to reduce the cost. Going down the path of focusing on cost can only get you so far. This is for the same reason that a company that only focuses on reducing cost will not grow. Alternatively, focus on increasing value for the organisation means targeting a much bigger piece of the pie. Here is an example of why focusing on value often means creating a lot more impact than focusing on cost.
To adopt a rigorous logic-based approach in determining your change approach, use the MECE framework. MECE stands for mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. The framework is commonly used by strategy consultants when they analyse the organisation and determine what strategies to formulate.
MECE framework (from Case interview)
There are 2 aspects to using this model. The model is based on a scientific hypothesis approach to problem-solving. This means that you must always begin with a hypothesis, followed by branches that test the hypothesis. To goal is to prove or disprove the hypothesis. For example, “by open-sourcing change tactics, we will achieve a better change outcome”. Then you can draw a tree diagram that branches out the various factors that can either support or disprove this. For example, these could be the potential branches:
The culture of the company is hierarchical and employees are not always forthcoming in openly sharing their ideas and expect to be lead
The project has a particularly tight timeline and there may not be sufficient time to properly engage the community for various ideas
Program sponsor and key stakeholders already have a fixed idea of how they want to implement the change, and therefore may not be open to other ideas
The organisation does not have a history of undergoing significant change and therefore employees may not understand the effort required to drive and sustain the change
Tree diagram (from Case interview)
From each branch, there can be subbranches that call out the evidence or reasoning for each branch. In this case, there seems to be strong logic that this hypothesis is false. Therefore, this is not a good strategy to use for this initiative.
Use the MECE approach to strategize your change approach. A lot of practitioners tend to prefer to follow standard change management models and methodologies. This may be OK as a reference, or a reminder. However, an effective change approach that is strategically focused on what the organisation needs must be developed using a logic-based approach. One that is tailored and designed specifically for the unique situation that the company is in currently.
Your change strategy or approach should always be unique to the requirements of the organisation. It should never be a ‘copy’ of another initiative because no two initiatives are ever completely the same. There will be tactics that are similar across initiatives, such as engagement approaches utilised or impact assessment design. However, the change strategy needs to call out what is unique about this initiative and how the change strategy is specifically designed for this situation.
Build change measurement and tracking
Business strategy can only be successful if it can be measured. Without measurement, there is no way of knowing if the objectives are achieved or when to abandon the strategy and adapt/tweak as required. The same applies to change strategy and execution. The change strategy must come with a set of metrics in order to gauge to what extent the strategy is successful or not.
Be aware of not creating too many metrics that will lead to significant effort required to capture and report the metrics. Balance effort and outcome in the tracking and reporting of change management metrics. Having anywhere from 3-5 metrics is a good number to target. When you start to have more metrics, the effort required may be too overwhelming.
Application of strategic approaches throughout the project lifecycle
Let’s go through an example of how strategic change approaches can be applied throughout the project life cycle.
Scoping – Strategic approach to look widely at the effort involved
Typically during this phase of the project, change practitioners may tend to focus only on the operational aspect of scoping out the resources required to support the project and the level of impact on the organisation. However, it is also important to be clear about the strategic importance and positioning of this initiative.
In scoping out the change management effort required to support an initiative we need to understand the strategic importance of the initiative and where it stands compared to other initiative and organisational focus areas. Key questions to consider include:
What is the priority level of the initiative
What strategy is it supporting? What’s the level of strategic importance?
What’s the right level of focus to support this initiative, balanced against other organisational priorities? For example, what else would impacted stakeholders be focused on during the impact period, and therefore how do we support having the right priorities? (i.e. the right level of ambidexterity)
Are there opportunities to integrate the roll out of this initiative with other initiatives to simplify focus, organisational effort and aid change adoption (e.g. this could be done at a communications or learning roll-out levels)
Impact assessment – Utilise strategic analysis to understand business impact
In analysing the change impact of the initiative, a strategic approach means a depth of understanding of how the business is impacted by the initiative and what benefits will mean to the business. Each part of the business by definition has different focus areas, and the business impact will be different as a result. To conduct a strategic analysis of the impact of change undergoes the following:
What is the business environment including partners, customers and suppliers? How will the change influence the dynamics of this environment?
How will the work and value of the business unit be altered as a result of the change? Conduct this analysis at multiple layers of the business unit to tease out the implications?
Will there be financial, resourcing, time, cost or effort impacts on the business unit or stakeholder group?
Will the business unit’s own focus areas or strategies be altered as a result of the change? Will its metrics, tracking and reporting be altered as well?
Change strategy formulation
In formulating the change strategy for the initiative adopt the MECE approach as described previously. You may need to formulate different hypotheses and test them before arriving at the one that is the most applicable to the organisation. Feel free to share your tree branch with your stakeholders to take them through how the change strategy is formulated. Involve them to ‘test’ the assumptions as required in the formulation.
Systems and portfolio views of the organisation
A key part of strategic change management is approaching change from a holistic and ‘systems-based’ perspective. A change project should not be viewed in its isolation but as a piece of the overall system. This means you need to understand the potential relations of this initiative with other initiatives in supporting the same strategy, and what other initiatives are focused on by the impacted business units. Having a portfolio-level visibility of the various initiatives and their relative impacts on the organisation is a key capability to support planning and decision making. This also helps you to better position or clarify your initiative compared to other focus areas.
Examples of portfolio level views of change from The Change Compass
Strategic capabilities
Different organisations and business units will have different levels of capabilities in leading, executing, and embedding change. Within the timeline and resource challenges of one initiative, it is not always possible to address all the various aspects of capability gaps. In fact, you may even face multiple capability gaps that may potentially derail the project.
Conduct a strategic capability analysis to assess which capabilities are core and critical to the success of the project. Assign weighting to each capability in terms of importance and any existing gaps. Use this analysis to formulate the top one or two capabilities you may want to focus on supporting the business to ensure the rollout is successful. Strategy is about focus and making bets. By spreading your efforts too thin you might not be able to close any of the capability gaps.
Showing the value of change management is something that change practitioners have yearned for. Some senior leaders do not understand the value of change management and either see it as a normal part of general business management or don’t even understand what it is. For less mature organisations, change practitioners often need to spend significant time educating stakeholders and explaining why they are doing the work that they are hired for. Calculating and showing the financial value of change portfolio management can be the ultimate ‘proof’.
Calculating the value of change management has been a difficult task to accomplish since a lot of the work of managing change is deemed as ‘soft’ and about people and leadership. There are various attempts to calculate in financial terms the value of managing change. These approaches include ROI (return on investment) and cost-benefit analysis. However, this approach is purely focused on a cost level and does not look at the value of the impact of change management work.
At a change portfolio level, there is even less in the literature. Not only is there not a lot of content on how to manage a portfolio of changes, but there is also almost no mention in the literature on how to calculate the financial value of managing a change portfolio.
A lot of organisations do not invest in managing initiatives across the portfolio from a change management perspective. This could be due to a lack of change management maturity or experience. Managing initiatives across a portfolio requires not only senior leader sponsorship but also having the right change governance, operational routines, change management analytics and decision-making capability in conducting ‘air traffic control’, sequencing, and resource prioritisation.
One of the difficulties is in trying to measure the value of the whole discipline, which may be too complex and wide in breadth to take into account. A better approach may be to look at the tangible parts of value created from managing a portfolio of changes.
One of the key values of effectively managing a portfolio of changes is helping the organisation better prioritise the right initiatives, the right sequencing of initiative implementation, and therefore the right resources to support these initiatives. This includes not just the right resource focus and allocation from a project implementation perspective, but also from a business perspective when it comes to change readiness and adoption.
A McKinsey study showed that companies that are better at prioritising resources to support initiatives can reap an average of 40% more value than other companies. Note that this is not ‘up to 40%’ but an ‘average of 40%’. This is a significant finding and shows how much this impacts the value of the company.
How do we calculate this change portfolio financial value?
Step 1 – Calculating the value of the company
One simple way to calculate the value of a company can be calculated by using this simple equation:
Value = Earning after tax x P/E (price to earnings) Ratio
Earnings after tax = This number you should be able to get from Finance, or for public companies, this figure should be available in the published Income Statement.
Price to earnings ratio = There are several ways to get this figure. Market value per share divided by earnings per share. Or if this number is not available you can use the average P/E ratio number of 14 as the average for S&P 500.
Let’s take a few examples.
Your company’s earnings after tax is $100 million. And if your P/E ratio is not available, then the value of the company is $100 million x 14 = $1.4 billion.
Your company’s earnings after tax is $300 million. And if you’re P/E ratio is not available, then the value of the company is $300 million x 14 = $4.2 billion.
Step 2 – Calculating the value of prioritising resources to support your initiative portfolio
In the McKinsey study, the 40% increase in company value was over a 15 year period. Let’s assume this is taking into account the compounded effect of incremental value year in and year out. Using a reverse compounded interest calculator would equate to 2% per year in incremental value.
In the example where the value of company is $1.4 billion.
$1.4 billion x 0.02 (2%) = $28 million
In the example where the value of the company is $4.2 billion
$4.2 billion x 0.02 (2%) = $84 million
You can see now that we are talking about a significant chunk of money. This is because of the increase in the value of the company from making the right decisions in focusing and appropriately resourcing the prioritised set of initiatives and having the right business focus to support these initiatives. Creating the right focus, the right change sequences, the right change ‘packages’, and changes that are ‘bite-sized’ as needed can all contribute to optimised change outcomes.
Resources and organisational energy are also not wasted on initiatives that are less critical and perhaps more likely to fail or achieve less adoption. These then translate to enhanced overall benefit realisation, and therefore improved value creation for the company overall.
This contrasts significantly with the focus on individual projects and the calculation of ROI where change management is viewed as a cost to the business. At a per-project level this may make sense, however, most companies are executing multiple projects at the same time. Sure, you can try and calculate the change management ROI for every project and still not capture the total value. This is because “the sum is greater than its parts” to quote Aristotle.
How do we use this value?
There are many ways to use this financial calculation:
Business leaders who don’t understand the value of managing change across the portfolio and struggle to see the relevance or business benefit of investment in this area
Project portfolio managers who would like to better understand and articulate the ‘prize’ in focusing on change portfolio management beyond the existing project portfolio management focus areas
Operational leaders who would like to understand the value of ‘air traffic control’ of the various initiatives that impact their business units
Change practitioners who have been asked to prove the value of managing across the portfolio and why this is needed across multiple initiatives
Agile methodology is fast becoming the ‘norm’ when it comes to project methodology. There are strong benefits promised of faster development time, ability to morph with changing requirements, less time required to implement the solution, and better ability to meet project objectives. There aren’t too many organisations that do not use some form of agile project methodology in how they manage initiatives.
What started out as a way of developing software, has evolved into the accepted methodology for managing projects. A scan of literature available on the internet shows significant outline of the various roles and their importance in the agile project methodology process. Most roles are clearly outlined and accounted for. There are clear roles established for the business owner, the project manager, the scrum master, developers, testing and quality, product manager, architect, human-centred designer, and even IT operations.
However, there is a glaring gap. What about the role of the change manager?
A review of literature available through project management organisations such as APM (Association of Project Management) and PMI (Project Management Institute) showed glaring omission of the role of the change manager or change management practitioners from agile methodology. The same is also true for Scaled Agile Frameworks where there is a brief mention of the importance of change management in the agile approach, but no mention of the role of the change manager/practitioner.
Is it that there are less projects requiring change managers?
The evidence is against this hypothesis. Jobs in change management are plentiful, with data on ‘Indeed’ online employment portals pulling up over 38,000 job postings. On top of this, there is an increasing number of jobs posted. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “management analytics” which includes change management, is projected to have a 14% growth rate between 2018 and 2028. In Australia, the ‘Seek’ employment platform projected change management job growth to be at 15% growth in the next 5 years.
Is it that agile methodology is more for technical projects and therefore the omission of change managers?
The agile approach can be used for a range of different projects, but not all projects. There is certainly evidence of agile project methodology used in a wide range of industries from financial services, government, non-profit, pharmaceuticals, utilities, and retail industries. The agile methodology is commonly cited for being better for projects where the outcome is not clearly known and where the end change has a level of uniqueness.
However, it is not true that agile methodology is only used for more technical projects. Even for projects where the focus is not on technical development, agile approaches are used widely. Agile changes have been used for re-organisation exercises. Here is an example from the Business Agility Institute. Executive teams also use agile means to manage various strategic initiatives that are not technical. Agile approaches are even applied to managing church initiatives.
What is the likely reason for the clear omission of change management in the agile methodology?
It is likely that those in charge of documenting agile methodology haven’t figured out how to incorporate change management into their frameworks.
Organisations in charge of documenting agile methodology are mainly focused on project management and software development. If we take the examples of PMI and APMG, both are project management associations, and both are focused on the project management perspectives of agile. The portion on change management is a specialism of project management. It could be that these organisations have not sufficiently developed agile change management methodology to integrate with agile project management.
Example of agile change documentation from Change Automator
Even at Scaled Agile, which is about applying agile across the organisation, the omission of the role of change managers is still the case. Frameworks from Scaled Agile are quite detailed and rigorous. All aspects of the roles of various organisational members are clearly outlined. Even the role of IT departments in DevOps are clearly spelled out to support agile. But not the role of change managers. Again, this could be due to those at Scaled Agile not having a change management background, and therefore not being able to articulate the various role detail.
However, there are some very critical roles that change practitioners play not only at project level, but at program, epic, and organisational levels. Without the right change management support the following are key risks when organisations are working at SaFe (scaled agile) level:
Change sequencing to maximise adoption across the change portfolio
Packaging change to achieve optimal change adoption, e.g. in terms of integrating communications and learning interventions across projects
Establishing business unit based change champions that can support multiple projects and can help piece together different changes for impacted employees
Identify and manage potential change saturation and change fatigue
Example of data visualization to support scaled agile from The Change Compass
There are some attempts at closing the gap to document agile change management approaches. However, most are conceptual, high level, and not sufficiently detailed to provide clear guidance and practical application for the change practitioner. On the other hand, the work of change management in agile projects should not only be clear for the change practitioner but also be clear for the project manager and other project members.
What’s the problem of omitting the role of change managers from agile methodologies?
1. The role of change management could easily be omitted. Particularly for less experienced project managers who are starting out in agile. The risk could be that change management is omitted from the project altogether since it is not called out as a clear role
2. Change practitioners are not clear with the roles they play and therefore are not sufficiently involved in driving and supporting the project in the right way. Since there is not a clear set of guidelines and methodology for change practitioners, it is common to see varying approaches in how change managers support agile projects. Some still use a similar approach as to supporting waterfall projects which may not be appropriate.
3. Agile projects are not successful because change management work is not sufficiently incorporated. With change management roles not spelt out, the project executes the change without critical change management foundations and therefore is at the risk of not achieving the adoption and benefit realisation targeted.
What should we do about this?
1. Encourage change management associations such as CMI and ACMP to invest in detailing agile change management methodology in a way that sets standards and guidelines for change practitioners to follow.
2. Influence and work with APMG, PMI and Scaled Agile to include explicitly the role of change managers and agile change management methodology.
Change management is emerging to be a strong discipline that executives are starting to recognise as critical to successful change. The role of change practitioners should be stated explicitly and recognised clearly. Change managers should not have to tip-toe in maneuvering their place in supporting agile change projects, nor should they need to convince other project team members of their place throughout various agile routines and methodology phases. It is now time for the change community to drive this and achieve the recognition that it deserves.
Delivering constant changes is a requirement in implementing agile change management. With each iteration, a change is being designed and released as a part of ongoing agile development and project implementation. However, there is little mention in change management literature of how to go about delivering change constantly and be able to achieve optimum change adoption.
Continuous delivery pipeline
The concept of a ‘continuous delivery pipeline’ is a core part of the agile methodology. It refers to having a structured pipeline of continuous changes being released as required by the organisation. The pipeline contains a set of features and changes to be worked on, and the resulting prioritised changes are released when and as needed.
The three components of a continuous delivery pipeline that forms an agile release train include:
Continuous exploration – This is about defining and scoping what needs to be built using human centred design approaches to design the problem that needs to be solved from the user perspective
Continuous integration – This step involves taking those prioritised features from the backlog and investigating further to understand what development work is required to turn them into solutions for the user.
Continuous deployment – This is about turning the completed changes from the staging environment into production, meaning the live product that is ready to be used by the user. After the technical part of the solution is ready to be released, the business then determines when is a good time for this release to go ahead.
The ‘technical side’ of the agile team is fairly well defined in terms of the roles and responsibilities of each member, including project manager, developer, QA/testing, business analyst, business owner, etc. However, the role of the change manager is much less defined and black and white. This does not mean that there is no role for the change manager though. It just means that the agile literature has not well defined the details for the role of the change manager in an agile team. ‘Agile change management’ still has some work to do to make itself better known to other agile team members.
So how does the change manager get ready to deliver a series of constant changes?
Delivering a series of constant changes is no easy feat. The main issue is that most businesses are not designed to face multiple changes, and nor are they designed to face a series of continual changes either.
Change approaches are primarily written for working on one change at a time, and not in a setting where there are continual releases of changes going on. On the other hand, how many organisations do you know that are only facing one change? Or that only deals with one change within a month? This type of stable change environment may have been the norm years ago when the business environment was much more predictable and stable. Hence, using a waterfall project approach was appropriate at the time. Fast-forwarding to the 2020s most organisations are juggling with constant and multiple changes as the norm.
1. Derive a picture of the changes within the continuous delivery pipeline.
Deriving a clear picture of what changes look like within a project is critical. Without this, you will not be able to clearly communicate to your stakeholders what changes are coming down the pipeline.
To create this picture, use a human-centred approach and illustrate what the user will go through throughout the change journey. This is similar to a user journey map. However, a change-focused picture goes beyond just what the user will be going through. It also includes not just person-based changes, but also process, policy, system, governance, reporting and other changes. Outlining these changes will complete the whole picture of what each change release may look like.
A key problem in creating a picture of the changes early on is that the project team may not even know what the solution looks like. And without particular details of every change release and solution design, it may be hard to create this picture.
The recommended approach is to focus on what the outcome could look like versus focusing on various technical or process solutions. This means you may even need to make particular assumptions in defining what these changes look like. For example:
Release 1: Ability to turn recorded customer conversations into text. With this feature, there will be new risk and privacy processes and governance be put in place in the monitoring and storage of customer data.
Release 2: Ability to search for customer conversation history and flag follow up actions required. Specialist roles may be required to audit customer conversation text. Behaviour shifts in proactively checking on customer history and knowing what to look for in trends is critical.
Release 3: Ability to use analytics to predict customer turnover and use this to minimise customer turnover. Significant capability uplift is required to ensure that consultants are able to know how to use analytics to help minimise customer turnover. Analytics capability uplift is also required at operations management, supervisor and team leader levels.
2. Map holistic stakeholder impacts.
In order to implement constant ongoing changes, it is critical to understand holistically what the stakeholders are undergoing across all types of changes and other BAU impacts. Without taking these into account it is not possible to truly understand the capacity of stakeholders and when changes will best ‘stick’ when released.
Some of the items that should be inventoried and mapped include:
Impacts from the current project that you are working on
Other project impacts that affect the stakeholder at the same time as your project, including any benefit realization periods post project implementation
BAU-led initiatives that could include business improvement or quality, and may not classified as ‘funded projects’ per se
Key high work volume periods such as end of financial year, holiday season, etc.
Audits, planning or reviews where additional work volumes are forecasted
It does take investment and effort to collect all these types of data and most change managers do not bother to do this. However, it is not possible to implement a successful change when you do not understand what other changes or work priorities your stakeholders are undergoing during the change process.
It is also important to note that this type of impact data can change constantly and once the data is collected it needs to be verified on a timely basis with any changes and updates reflected over time. Doing this activity manually can be quite cumbersome so we advise using digital tools such as The Change Compass.
The collected data on what stakeholders are undergoing can be significantly valuable. Often stakeholders themselves have not undertaken this exercise to truly understand the change journeys and work priorities added together holistically. They may be surprised by the picture you are presenting to them. At the minimum, they will value this since it shows that you have a deep understanding of what they will be going through and therefore create more stakeholder confidence.
Examples of data visualisation from The Change Compass
3. Sizing and categorising the impacts of changes
After getting a clear picture of holistic change environment that the stakeholders will be undergoing the next step is to analyse the impacts from your project. In analysing the change impacts you should be ascertaining the nature of these change impacts including:
Size of the impact
How long the impacts will last
How much time these impacts translate to
Types of these impacts (e.g. people, process, system, customer, etc.)
To whom the impacts will be on
Quantitatively sizing your impacts makes them concrete and easily understood. Armed with this information you are able to examine to what extent the planned releases are the right ‘size’ for the impacted stakeholder groups. This is another critical part of agile change management. In determining this, the following stakeholder factors are critical:
Capacity bandwidth
Potential overlaps across various impacts either within the same or with other projects or initiatives
Change maturity level and experience with similar changes in the past
Leadership support and other change reinforcement mechanisms
Overall change readiness
Engagement level with the particular change initiative
When you have considered all of these factors you are ready to engage with your project manager, the PMO, and business representatives to assess to what extent the roadmap laid out is effective and will work to maximise the targeted initiative benefits.
4. Business operations routines
Now you understand clearly the change environment of your impacted stakeholders, various changes within yours’ and other initiatives, and the categories of the various change impacts. The next step is to clarify to what extent your impacted business units have the right operational process to receive ongoing changes. This is often a neglected part of agile change management.
More change mature business units have over time developed the right routines and processes to absorb changes, especially ongoing ones. What are some of these?
Effective engagement processes. Engagement processes are not just one-way communication channels. Having effective communications channels such as newsletters and town halls are a minimum for employees to hear about what is coming down the pipeline. Engagement processes include such as effectively choreographed Yammer channels, skip-level meetings (where managers meet with employees 2 levels down), focus group sessions with a small group of select employees, and effective team meetings where information is passed both up and down the chain of command
Effective learning processes. Effective learning processes at a business unit level includes business operations routines whereby employees have individual development plans (from which training plans can be incorporated), ongoing monitoring of development tracking against targets (e.g. completion rates), virtual learning processes (e.g. employee familiarity with virtual ways of self-initiated learning)
Change champion network. Most change champion networks are project-based and therefore have a limited shelf-life. This means that business change champions have a limited time to learn and develop as effective change champions. They also have limited time to practice and experience what it is like to lead and support change. A better design for business units undergoing ongoing changes is to have business unit based change champions that can support a myriad of changes across the board. This flexes their capability. Also, with constant exposure to changes over time, they are able to continuously develop and become better change champions. Organisations that have done this well, have positioned this as a ‘talent pool’ for frontline employees seeking to grow into other challenging roles.
Benefit realisation processes. Tracking and reinforcing benefit realisation is one of the most critical ingredients for success in the impacted business unit. Usually a month after go-live, the project would have already wrapped up and the business is left to continue the rest of the change journey and achieve the targeted benefits. To do this the business unit needs to have clear benefit realisation tracking and reinforcing mechanisms, involving Finance and business leaders. There needs to be constant oversight of how the benefit tracking is trending and leader discussions on resolving any obstacles and providing adequate managerial support to drive the benefit realisation process.
If your impacted business unit lacks one or more of these ingredients, it is critical that you work on this upfront. Highlight to business leaders the risk of not having these ingredients in place within the business. These processes may take significant time and investment to build up. Therefore, factor in the time required to develop these. Often, within the challenges of agile changes, these are left until the end, by which time it is too late to try and establish quickly to support the identified project changes.
