Agile is all the rage at the moment in driving change and transformation. Many call out the importance of stakeholder management, communicating regularly, ensuring strong sponsorship, and clarity of business requirements. Others emphasize the need to have continual people interactions versus documentation and processes. For the uninitiated all of these seem to make sense, but yet not that different compared to using other methodologies in other projects. Agile methodologies have emerged as the catalysts for change and transformation. Anchored by principles such as stakeholder engagement, transparent communication, and robust sponsorship, Agile’s true essence lies in its unique approach – the rapid release of incremental changes, fostering a culture of continual learning and adaptability.
One of the key tenets of agile involves releasing a series of smaller changes rapidly, learning and adjusting from each release, rather than spending a longer time to work on a much bigger release that may or may not be successful.
However, releasing a series of changes can be unsettling, disruptive, and hard to keep up for employees. This is especially the case for larger programs when the timeline could go for more than 1 year. Combining several programs, you can imagine the unsettling rather of these changes on employees and the business.
How do we resolve this? The key is to provide a strong picture of the end state and how things will look like and set the expectation that there will be a series of changes, providing examples of these as well as explaining why this is an effective way to drive change. Yes, We may not know exactly the details of the end state, but the business should be clear in the overall outcomes and key works to get there.
To do this effectively we need to be able to connect the dots and tell the story of the journey of change and how the different changes connect to lead us to the end state. Sounds simple? Yet lots of companies are not able to reach this outcome due to a big pipeline of changes.
Illustrating the Power of Digital Connectivity
Agile in Software Development: Consider a software development project embracing Agile principles. Instead of the traditional monolithic release after months of development, Agile allows teams to deliver functional components regularly. Users gain hands-on experience early, providing invaluable feedback for immediate adjustments.
Navigating Business Transformation: In a complex business transformation, Agile’s iterative approach proves invaluable. Imagine a company implementing a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. Agile permits incremental updates based on user feedback, ensuring the CRM aligns seamlessly with evolving business needs.
Strategic Resource Allocation: A company grappling with a pipeline of diverse changes faces challenges in maintaining clarity. Digital tools, like ‘The Change Compass,’ offer a panoramic view, enabling leaders to visualize the interconnectedness of initiatives. This facilitates strategic decision-making and precise resource allocation.
Employee-Centric Transformations: Consider an organization rolling out changes to internal workflows. Agile, supported by digital tools, empowers leaders to communicate phased changes effectively. This ensures employees not only understand the bigger picture but also feel more engaged in the transformation process.
The solution? Use digital means to connect the dots and not rely on personal interpretation. Use a digital tool to examine what is coming down the pipeline, and therefore create meaning and better prioritize initiatives to move the business forward. By seamlessly weaving Agile methodologies into their fabric and harnessing the power of tools such as ‘The Change Compass,’ organizations adeptly steer through the ever-evolving landscape of perpetual change. Serving as a strategic guide, ‘The Change Compass’ leverages analytics and machine learning to streamline change orchestration, prioritize initiatives, and guide organizations with precision and confidence toward their transformation targets. This approach cultivates a work environment characterized by transparency, adaptability, and active engagement. As a result, the journey toward the end state transforms into a seamlessly connected narrative of continual progress and sustainable growth.
“A recent survey by the Change Management Institute (Employment Study) in 2015 indicated that 77% of all Change Management roles in Australia are contract roles. Are you surprised by this figure? Would you have expected this figure to be lower or higher? And why is it that most Change roles here are contract roles?
Many of you will state that obviously Change roles are there to help the company design and implement a change initiative and since changes are time-bound, it makes sense to employ a contract Change expert only for this duration. Others will call out that the flip side to this approach is that change capability comes and goes and the organization is not really able to build its inherent ability to.
Let’s look at how some of the most admired companies approach this. For those companies that are consistently listed the most admired global companies such as Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, etc., the approach is very different. For these organisations there is not a lot of ongoing contract Change roles. Instead, the leadership and operations uptake the responsibilities of driving change. And yes, this includes project work where folks work on change impact assessments and implementation planning.
Take for example, at Intel the company typically redeploys its talent regionally and globally and where needed specialists may be brought in to lead or support change initiatives such as a new system implementation or new strategy. On the ground, operations leads are identified within the business and are expected to drive, support, communicate and monitor the progress of the initiative. Change capability is built into ongoing management and team development, though there are also internal training courses focused specifically on Change. This model drives significant business ownership and avoids a lot of the buck passing and challenges of reaching full benefit realization compared to the mainly contractor model.
A key requirement of this model is that the business needs to be very clear with its key focus areas in driving change and not be inundated by too many initiatives. The leadership and operational leads constantly review a dashboard of initiatives and are clear with their impacts as well as the prioritization of the initiatives.
I’m not advocating that companies do not need Change contractors at all but we need to be clear what our operating model is to build change capability. Are we only seeking a pair of hands as needed to do project work? Or do we have a more strategic approach to design change know-how within the organization? What has been your experience in designing a Change Management model that builds inherent capability?
The Change Compass is an industry-first change management tool that helps organisations manage change impacts through data vs opinions.
“In the corporate world, most approaches in defining the business value of change involve hard benefits such as revenue, cost, and time. For example, increased revenue per customer, reduced people costs, and improvement in processing time. Yes, there are non-financial benefits such as capability improvement and strategic alignment. However, in practice, most tend to focus more on hard benefits that are more tangible and easier to track.
The problem is that benefits are usually defined in a top-down, linear way and have not taken into account the environment that determines the benefits. For example, a Strategy department defines the need to cut people costs by 10% and therefore the analysis will subsequently focus on headcount reduction or pay and benefits reduction. Finance will therefore work with HR and the business to start defining which headcounts to cut and any opportunities to reduce pay and benefits. A list is then gathered to report on potential cost savings in dollar terms.
What is wrong with this scenario?
On paper, everything looks fine, but without actually involving those managers in business and understanding the environment in which the costs will be saved it is hard to determine the actual benefits. How much influence do these roles have on the organization from lateral networking and influencing perspective? Can any of these roles be critical in implementing the change process? What are the potential impacts in service delivery resulting from these cuts? The learning here is that top-down analysis of benefits can often only be treated as high level and we need to work within the organization to find out the real benefits.
In a previous role, an IT department wanted to reduce the $25 per call for employees to change their passwords. When I started finding out more about the experience and the process for an employee to change passwords the discovery I made was quite shocking. The $25 was negligible compared to the real cost. For example, my colleague Barbra just returned from maternity leave and had forgotten her login password. She rang the Helpdesk 4 times to try and retrieve her password but was unsuccessful for some reason. Barbara became increasingly irate. We’ve heard her screaming at the phone, taking breaks to calm down, and talking to others to express her frustration. For days she was not able to log on. For Barbara’s case, the company has lost the equivalent of 3 days in productivity to the tune of $2500. We’ve also found other similar cases.
So how might we better analyse and assess the benefits of change initiatives?
We can do this by observing the environment for those impacted by the change initiative. Utilise human-centred approaches in observing the employee or the customer and how the initiatives may impact their lives. These include observation, seeing the whole picture by putting yourself into their shoes, identifying the impacts on various people and processes, and if needed interviewing them after observation to find out more. What else will be happening in their worlds other than the change initiative in concern? Will there be risks of overlaps or time conflicts for different initiatives?
Tally various sources of benefits observed. Who are the people potentially impacted by the change initiative? What processes and systems are impacted? Therefore, what are the sources of potential benefits in terms of time, cost, or revenue?
Test change initiative and benefits before large-scale rollout
Test at a smaller scale initial change implementation approaches on the selected target audience and observe the effects of change and resulting benefits. Experiment and tweak these approaches before larger-scale implementation.
In the new digital world, we are all about using technology and the web to make our lives easier, more productive, and efficient. However, in the change management world, there is not a lot of tools out there to help us become leaner and more effective in managing change. A lot of other functions and disciplines have a range of digital tools to help them become more effective, but the same range of change management software is not yet available for change practitioners.
Why do we need software to manage change impacts?
In large companies, most departments are siloed and therefore it is difficult to get one integrated view of all changes
As the pace of change increases many companies are finding it simply too complex to try and manage change using spreadsheets. Change initiative information, like any data, becomes redundant very quickly therefore we need technology tools to help keep the data current.
Change impact information is critical for operational resource planning and managing customer experience. Constant and relevant data is required. Without a view of all the change impacts, including those deemed projects, improvement initiatives, Six Sigma, cultural change, product launches it is hard for us to see what changes are going to happen.
Often we are making business change decisions based on opinions and with the right software we can ensure that we are using data to make decisions
What are some of the existing offerings?
A quick search through the posts and articles in this Linkedin group has surfaced mostly with technical change management tools. There are lots of tools that focus on digital engagement, social networks, and collaboration. These include Pinipa, Sharepoint, and Change Scout. And others focus on Training such as WalkMe.
What is the current gap?
Most companies have data on typical project information such as cost and timeline. However, what we need is information on the nature of the change impact on employees and customers, e.g. what type of change, the quantum of change, when, in what location, and who are impacted.
The Change Compass provides a solution for companies undergoing multiple changes to have an integrated view of change impacts and guides business leaders to make the right data-based decisions.
As change practitioners, we often hear that Change is intangible and hard to measure – A key concern with change management metrics. As a result, the discipline is often perceived as less value-adding and less critical to the business and program performance. We work with technical, finance, process, and operations specialists who often do not get what we are on about.
In Michael Tushman’s Harvard Business Review article about change management he asserted that change management must become more data-driven to keep up with business demands. Otherwise, change management will no longer contribute critical value to the organisation that it should, and instead, risk being overlooked.
A typical scenario that Change practitioners often complain about is that they are in a typical project meeting where everyone is consumed with technical defects, testing data, project cost, and delivery resource requirements. From an analytics and reporting perspective, I often hear how hard it is to highlight and position the importance of Change data. But, as a part of Change delivery, we do produce various data to track progress. Why are we still not able to be at the centre of the table?
The problem is that most of the data we produce is data that is not positioned to link strongly to ultimate business outcomes. For example:
Employee feedback
Employee opinions are useful and insightful, however, this often reflects what stakeholders already suspected.
Change readiness surveys
Again, potentially useful and insightful. But, is agreeing to the statements in the survey equivalent to actual behavior change? (i.e. knowing vs doing) Does positive survey results guarantee business impact and full benefits realized.
Training completion rates
Training completion rates may be a minimum requirement to ensure the knowledge transfer has happened. However, will the behavior change? What is the impact on the operations?
What else to focus on measuring?
What we need is to focus on the critical business outcomes and be able to demonstrate how change management data provides leading indicators to:
1) the likelihood of realizing initiative benefits, and
2) impact on the business.
For example, if an organization is focused on improving customer experience, then we need to demonstrate how initiatives could impact their experience. Firstly, we need to work out to what extent the customer cares about the effects of the initiative, the magnitude of the impacts on customers, and whether the impacts are positive or negative (from the perspective of the customer).
With our understanding of employee and stakeholder readiness and adoption levels, these can be turned into the extent to which benefits may be realised. Any potential blockers in terms of adoption progress and sentiments may be utilised as an indication for benefit realisation.
Example of setting up a Change dashboard from Change Automator
In these ways, we have demonstrated the importance of managing change impacts over the timeline since any increase or decrease in customer experience could equate to hundreds of millions of dollars (according to Forrester research). Suddenly, we are now talking about top-line revenue impacts that will put us in the centre of attention. What has been your experience in linking change data to business results?
