by The Change Compass | Change Initiatives, Change Measurement
So you’ve climbed the change management career ladder. You’ve not only managed complex projects, but are starting to help the business manage the change landscape. Like most organisations, the business you are supporting is implementing various changes to stay competitive and relevant in this fast-changing world.
Like most others, you’ve produced manual change heatmaps to help them visualize how much change there is going on. They’re seeing which parts of the business has more change than others. They can now see the ‘hot spots’ where there could be too much change. Month in and month out you continue to produce the same reports for them. They start to get bored and ask … “Is there more to the change landscape than just looking at the question of ‘too much’ or ‘too little’?”
This is a very valid question indeed!
Across our change management industry, it seems that producing change heatmaps and being focused singularly on one question is the norm. We all know that change is complex. Change is evolving. Change is multi-dimensional. Change is more than just answering one question. Is there more?
YES 🙂
Beyond just asking a singular, one-dimensional question of “is there too much change”. How do we graduate from this and progress to the next few stages of adding further value to the organization? Here are 5 ways to do this.
1. Focus on understanding what the change story is versus asking a singular question.
What is happening or going to happen to the business? Is the business focused in a disciplined way on a small set of changes that will create very large impacts? Are these due to significant operating model transformations that are necessary to take the business to the next level? Are these multi-year transformation programs? How do these translate to behavior, process and system impacts? Would we need to phase a series of changes to drive the behaviour changes?
Or is the business undergoing less transformational but a larger set of smaller changes to be more competitive in delivering better customer experiences, more efficient and effective operations at a lower cost? And therefore, are the people impacts more about connecting across the breadth of changes. Are the challenges on connecting the dots across a wide set of changes, versus a smaller core of large ones?
2. Collect other data to tell the story. Data has more weighting than opinions and assertions in the business decision making table. Change data regarding impact, timing, types of changes, number of people impacted, etc., will go a long way to tell the story of what the business will be experiencing. Make the data visual. Visual storytelling using data is becoming the norm in digital businesses nowadays. To graduate from manual spreadsheets of change heatmap, focus on digital change storytelling with data.
3. How is the change impacting various stakeholders such as customers, partners and subject-matter-experts?
A significant percentage of organisations state that they are focused on the customer. Does the business understand the nature of change impact on a particular type of customer at any given time? Without understanding this how could the customer experience be effectively managed? Producing data visualization of how the customer is impacted, at what time, and in what way, will go a long way to lead the business in understanding how best to manage the customer experience during change.
Similar data visualization can also be produced for other stakeholder groups such as partners, subject matter experts, and other groups.
This is an example of ‘Total Impact’ chart from The Change Compass where you can see the impact on stakeholders across time.
4. What is the pace of change?
Is the overall pace of the planned execution of the strategy going to meet the organisation’s targets? When we look at the lifecycle of the changes being planned including the time it takes to embed the changes to realize the benefits, is the pace fast enough? Alternatively, could it be that the business is over-zealous in driving change to the detriment of its people and customers? Is the question not that there is too much change, but that the pace is going too fast and we are not realistically factoring the time required to embed and land the benefits required?
One real example. A business has been focused on adopting agile ways of working. It has also been applying this to grow its business. As a result, the business has commenced a series of experiments to try and find ways to drive business growth. However, because there weren’t specifically defined targets from a planning perspective, the planned experiments kept getting delayed. As a result, the change pipeline became slow. Therefore, overall growth targets were not met.
This is an example of ‘Timeline Chart’ from The Change Compass where you can decipher the impacts of initiatives across time.
5. Focus on what the execution of the organisation’s strategy will look like and if it makes sense.
In planning the execution of the strategy, the strategy team rarely looks at the totality of change from an impact perspective. This is not due to a lack of trying but mainly due to lack of access to change data. Armed with change data, it is possible to understand to what extent different strategies are impacting different parts of the business, and whether these make logical sense or not.
Is there a diverse set of strategies that the company is implementing? Do these have wide-ranging impacts on various parts of the business or are certain businesses more impacted than others? How do we ensure that the ‘why’ of the change and how we are communicating initiatives are clearly linked to the same strategy across initiatives? From a prioritization perspective are there certain initiatives are that more core to the strategy? How do we ensure that these are given more ‘run-way’ to roll out the changes than others? And again how do we ensure that these are highlighted and clearly communicated to impacted stakeholder groups?
This is an example of a strategy implementation chart that visually illustrates the impact that each strategy has on the business and the various initiatives that are linked to the strategy.
Outlined here are just some of the ways in which you can ‘graduate’ from just focusing on change heatmaps as the only way to help the business visualize change. There are other ways in which change management can add value to the organization and we will continue to outline other ways in which this may be achieved. Stay tuned!
by The Change Compass | Uncategorized
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
by The Change Compass | Change Initiatives, Designing change
Managing customer experience is in vogue at the moment. This is particularly the case for competitive industries where there is little differentiation in terms of price points and services offered such as banking and utilities. Touting the company’s focus on ‘customer experience is the new mantra for a lot of companies.
Most financial services firms and telecom companies, amongst others, have been jumping on this bandwagon and have built various customer experience teams and centres of excellence. However, for large innovative US companies such Starbucks, Apple and Intel Customer Experience has been at the heart of how products and services have been designed for over 10 years.
What are the key challenges in driving customer experience management? Research by Harvard Business Review Analytics Services in 2014 showed that 51% of companies surveyed indicated one of their top challenges to be achieving a single view of the customer. In addition, 51% of companies surveyed also indicated that building new customer experiences is another key challenge. These two are not mutually exclusive as you may point out.
This conundrum strikes at the heart of the reality for large organisations – the ability to integrate different sources of customer data across different departments, channels and systems into a picture that can be easily understood and utilised. This is necessary to truly achieve a single view of the customer. It is then through a single view of the customer that companies may be able to change or build new customer experiences.
However, there is one very large gap in this equation. The key focus on driving customer experience improvements through data has been on CRM systems that capture various customer and marketing data. CRM systems have focused on providing effective marketing automation, salesforce automation and contact centre automation. Other than data companies have also invested heavily in digital and other self service channels. What about the other side of the equation? I.e. an integrated single picture of the initiatives that the company is driving to define/change the customer experience (intentionally or unintentionally)?
These initiatives include not only marketing and promotional campaigns, but also product changes, legislative change communications, pricing changes, IT changes, and even other companies initiatives that can indirectly impact customer service or the media. Most large organisations either have no way of creating this integrated picture or have disconnected spreadsheets that track segments of the overall initiatives.
What risks does this create for companies? By not having an integrated picture of how a company is impacting and shaping its customer experience it cannot truly manage that experience holistically. Banks often experience this. One department called for a credit card to be end of life whilst another called for increased sales to meet target. The bankers and customers became very confused as you can imagine. A 2013 Ernst & Young survey found that companies are losing $720 per negative customer experience. The same research also found that 40% of households have had a negative experience with a telecommunications company, whilst 25% have had a negative experience with a utilities company. There is a lot of money at stake here as you can see.
The solution is to piece together all company change initiatives that impact customers (directly, and indirectly through employees) with specific focus on change impacts. Single view of change impact data of what type of customer, when, to what level, with what change, etc. can be integrated with other sources of customer data (e.g. CRM system data and customer experience mapping info) to create a powerful picture of:
-What the company is planning to roll out to customers at a holistic and aggregate level, and how this is shaping the customer experience?
-How aligned or misaligned these customer change impacts are with the customer strategy?
-To what extent there are clashes amongst different change initiatives from different departments in conveying the targeted customer experience?
-To what extent there is too much or too little change in shaping the customer experience within the initiative pipeline, as aligned with the strategy?
-From these powerful integrated pictures of what is happening to the customer’s experience critical decisions may be made to best design the optimal experience?
