Tag: Change adoption - Page 3 - The Change Compass

How to measure change adoption

by The Change Compass | Change approach, Change Measurement, Uncategorized

Measuring the change adoption of stakeholders is one of the most important parts of the work of change practitioners. It is the ultimate ‘proof’ of whether the change interventions have been successful or not in achieving the initiative objectives. It is also an important way in which the progress of change management can clearly be shown to the project team as well as to various stakeholder groups.

Measurement takes time, focus and effort. It may not be something that is a quick exercise. There needs to be precise data measurement design, a reliable way of collecting data, and data visualisation that is easily understood by stakeholders.

With the right measurements of change adoption, you can influence the direction of the initiative, create impetus amongst senior stakeholders, and steer the organisation toward a common goal to realise the change objectives. Such is the power of measuring change adoption.

The myth of the change management curve

One of the most popular graphs in change management and often referred as the ‘change curve’ is the Kubler-Ross model. The model was specifically designed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross to refer to terminally ill patients as a part of the book ‘On Death and Dying’. For whatever reason, it has somehow gained popularity and application in change management.

There is little research evidence to back this up even in psychological research. When applied in change management there is no known research that supports this at all. On the other hand, there is ample research by McKinsey that for effectively managed initiatives and transformations, stakeholders do not go through this ‘valley of death’ journey at all.

The ‘S’ curve of change adoption

If the ‘change curve’ is not the correct chart to follow with regard to change adoption, then what is the right one to refer to?

The ‘S’ curve of change adoption is one that can be referenced. It is well backed in terms of technology and new product adoption research. It follows a typically slow start followed by a significant climb in adoption followed by a flattened level at the end. Here is an example of key technologies and the speed of adoption in U.S. households since the 1900s.

With the different types of change contexts, the shape of the S curve will be expected to differ as a result. For example, you are working on a fairly minor process change where there is not a big leap in going from the current process to the new process. In this case, the curve would be expected to be a lot more gentle since the complexity of the change is significantly less than adopting a complex, new technology.

Going beyond what is typically measured

Most change practitioners are focused on measuring the easier and more obvious measures such as stakeholder perceptions, change readiness, and training completion. Whilst these are of value, they in themselves are measuring aspects of the change. They can be viewed as forward-looking indications of the progress that supports moving toward eventual change adoption, versus the eventual change adoption.

To really address head-on the topic of measuring adoption, it is critical to go beyond these initial measures toward those elements that indicate the actual change in the organisation. Depending on the type of change this could be system usage, behaviour change, following a new process or achieving cost savings targets.

Project Benefit realization

It goes without saying that to really measure change adoption the change practitioner must work closely with the project manager to understand in detail the benefits targeted, and how the prescribed benefits will be measured. The project manager could utilise a range of ways to articulate the benefits of the project. Common benefit categories include:

Business success factors such as financial targets on revenue or cost
Product integration measures such as usage rate
Market objectives such as revenue target, user base, etc.

These categories above are objectives that are easier to measure and tangible to quantify. However, there could also be less tangible targets such as:

Competitive position
Employee relations
Employee experience
Product or solution leadership
Employee capability

There could be various economic methods of determining the targeted benefit objectives. These include payback time or the length of time from project initiation until the cumulative cash flow becomes positive, or net present value, or internal rate of return.

The critical part for change practitioners is to understand what the benefit objectives are, how benefit tracking will be measured and the interpret what steps are required to get there. These steps include any change management steps required to get from the current state to the future state.

Here is an example of a mapping of change management steps required in different benefit targets:

Project benefits targeted	Likely change management steps required	Change management measures
Increased customer satisfaction and improved productivity through implementing a new system.	Users able to operate the new system. Users able to improve customer conversations leveraging new system features. Users proactively use the new system features to drive improved customer conversations. Managers coaching and provide feedback to usersBenefit tracking and communications. Customer communication about improved system and processes Decreased customer call waiting time .	% of users passed training test. System feature usage rate. Customer issue resolution time. User feedback on manager coaching. Monthly benefit tracking shared and discussed in team meetings. Customer satisfaction rate. Customer call volume handling capacity.

Measuring behavioural change

For most change initiatives, there is an element of behaviour change, especially for more complex changes. Whether the change involves a system implementation, changing a process or launching a new product, behaviour change is involved. In a system implementation context, the behaviour may be different ways of operating the system in performing their roles. For a process change, there may be different operating steps which need to take place that defers from the previous steps. The focus on behaviour change aims to zoom in on core behaviours that need to change to lead to the initiative outcome being achieved.

How do we identify these behaviours in a meaningful way so that they can be identified, described, modelled, and measured?

The following are tips for identifying the right behaviours to measure:

Behaviours should be observable. They are not thoughts or attitudes, so behaviours need to be observable by others
Aim to target the right level of behaviour. Behaviours should not be so minute that they are too tedious to measure, e.g. click a button in a system. They also should not be so broad that it is hard to measure them overall, e.g. proactively understand customer concerns
Behaviours are usually exhibited after some kind of ‘trigger’, for example, when the customer agent hear certain words such as ‘not happy’ or ‘would like to report’ from the customer that they may need to treat this as a customer complaint by following the new customer complaint process. Identifying these triggers will help you measure those behaviours.
Achieve a balance by not measuring too many behaviours since this will create additional work for the project team. However, ensure a sufficient number of behaviours are measured to assess benefit realisation

Measuring micro-behaviours

Behaviour change can seem over-encompassing and elusive. However, it may not need to be this. Rather than focusing on a wide set of behaviours that may take a significant period of time to sift, focusing on ‘micro-behaviours’ can be more practical and measurable. Micro-behaviours are simply small observable behaviours that are small step-stone behaviours vs a cluster of behaviours.

For example, a typical behaviour change for customer service reps may be to improve customer experience or to establish customer rapport. However, breaking these broad behaviours down into small specific behaviours may be much easier to target and achieve results.

For example, micro-behaviours to improve customer rapport may include:

User the customer’s name, “Is it OK if I call you Michelle?”
Build initial rapport, “How has your day been?”
Reflect on the customer’s feeling, “I’m hearing that it must have been frustrating”
Agree on next steps, “would it help if I escalate this issue for you?”

Each of these micro-behaviours may be measured using call-listening ratings and may either be a yes/no or a rating based assessment.

Establishing reporting process and routines

After having designed the right measurement to measure your change adoption, the next step would be to design the right reporting process. Key considerations in planning and executing on the reporting process includes:

Ease of reporting is critical, and you should aim to automate where possible to reduce the overhead burden and manual work involved. Whenever feasible leverage automation tools to move fast and not be bogged down by tedious work
Build expectations on contribution to measurement. Rally your stakeholder support so that it is clear the data contribution required to measure and track change adoption
Design eye-catching and easy to understand dashboard of change adoption metrics.
Design reinforcing mechanisms. If your measurement requires people’s input, ensure you design the right reinforcing mechanisms to ensure you get the data you are seeking for. Human nature is so that whenever possible, people would err on the side of not contributing to a survey unless there are explicit consequences of not filling out the survey.
Recipients of change adoption measurement. Think about the distribution list of those who should receive the measurement tracking. This includes not just those who are in charge of realising the benefits (i.e. business leaders), but also those who contribute to the adoption process, e.g. middle or first-line managers.

Example of change adoption dashboard from Change Automator

How To Improve Change Management Outcome Success? One LEGO brick at a time!

by The Change Compass | Change approach

Change Management outcome is the holy grail, and virtually all organisations are undergoing change. Now more than ever, companies are challenged with multiple layers of driving change simultaneously. What is applicable in this situation is not about a particular methodology of implementing a change program. It is all about implementing simultaneous changes, at the same time. There is no luxury of just focusing on one change at a time, the result of competitive, industry, and environmental challenges.

As change practitioners we work closely with our colleagues in Operations to get ready for, implement, and fully embed changes. So how do our colleagues in operations view and manage change initiatives?

Operations as a function is focused on managing performance and delivery to ensure that the business runs smoothly, with little disruptions, and that performance measures are achieved. Operations is focused on resource management, efficiency, and achieving the various operational indicators whether it’s customer satisfaction, turn-around time, average handling time, or cost target.

When times are hectic and a lot is going on with multiple change initiatives, the key focus for Operations is on managing people’s capacity. Key questions would be “Do we have sufficient time to cater for the various changes?”, and “Will we exceed our change saturation level?”. This is a critical question to answer since the business still needs to run and deliver services without negative change disruptions.

From an Operations planning perspective ‘change capacity‘ is often reduced to the time element, especially those impacting frontline staff.

For example:

What are the times required to reschedule the call centre consultants off the phone to attend training?
How much time is required in the team meeting agenda to outline the changes that are being rolled out?
What is the time involvement of change champions?

Though these are all critical questions clear answers will help Operations plan better to face multiple changes. However, this is not adequate. There is more to planning for multiple changes than just focusing on the time element.

Using the lego analogy to manage multiple changes

We all know LEGO as kids. To build a car we start one brick at a time and see how we go. We experiment with different colours, shapes, and sizes. We make do with the bricks we have and use our imagination to come up with what a car would look like. Sometimes we get stuck and we may need to tweak our bricks a little, or sometimes start from scratch.

It is the same as implementing change initiatives. In order to take people along the journey, we implement a series of activities and interventions so that our impacted stakeholders are aware, ready, committed, and embed the change. The design on the change journey is the process of determining what LEGO bricks to choose. There is no shortcut. It is not possible to build a building without each necessary brick to raise the building up. In implementing change, we also need to lay out each step in engaging our stakeholders.

McKinsey studies over decades have told us that one of the most critical factors to focus on in ensuring change outcome success is clear organisation-wide ownership and commitment to change across all levels. This means that when we design each change brick we need to ensure we target every level of impacted stakeholders.

For example:

Team Leaders: How often do we want Team Leaders to talk about the changes to their teams before the rollout? What content do we want them to use? Do they know how to translate the message in a way that resonates? Do we want them to tell compelling stories that talk to the what, why, and how of the change?

Managers: How are managers made accountable? What metrics are they accountable for? What mediums do we want them to use to engage their teams? What are the consequences of not achieving the outcomes?

Senior Managers: Through what mediums do we expect senior managers to engage their teams about the changes? How do we ensure that they are personally accountable for the success of the change? How are they involved to ensure they own the change?

Looking at the above you can see that for complex change there may need to be a lot of bricks in place to ensure the change outcome is successful!

Going back to the issue of facing into multiple changes, how do we play around with the bricks to ensure that multiple changes are successful? The same way that we play with LEGO bricks!

Look at the colours of the bricks. Do certain colours belong together? When we look across different initiatives, are there similar or common behaviours that can be better linked together to tell a compelling story? Do they support the same strategy? Can there be a joint campaign for these changes?
Is the overall LEGO structure going to be intact? What are the impacts of the various changes happening at the same time in terms of focus, performance and change outcome? Have we exceeded the likely ‘mental capacity’ for people to stay focused on a core set of changes at any one time? Will the pieced-together structure collapse due to having too many elements?
Look at the sizes of the LEGO structures. During implementation when we have both larger and smaller initiatives being executed at the same time, will the larger ones overshadow the smaller ones? If so what are the risks if any?
Re-jig or re-build parts of the LEGO structure as needed to see what it looks like. In a situation where we want to see what the changes look like before we action it, it makes sense to visualise what would happen if we move timelines or change implementation tactics

Example of data visualisation of ‘re-jigging’ change implementation timeline with The Change Compass using different scenarios.

Just like in building LEGO, for change initiatives we need to be agile and be flexible enough to play with and visualise what the change outcome could look like before pulling the trigger. We also need to be able to tweak as we go and adjust our change approaches as needed. In facing the multitude of changes that the organisation needs to be successful, we also need to be able to play with different implementation scenarios to picture how things will look like. Each brick needs to be carefully laid to reach the overall outcome.

Careful consideration also needs to be how all the bricks connect together – the analogy that the change outcomes across initiatives can be determined by how we’ve pieced together various pieces of LEGO for them to make sense, and result in the ownership and commitment of stakeholders.

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