It used to be that change management is the ‘poor’, neglected cousin of other disciplines in terms of access to functional software to assist in its performance across every aspect of change and risk management. There is a wide range of software available for a range of project management disciplines such as, business analysis, testing, project management, portfolio management, etc. However, for change management, the pickings have been almost non-existent 10 years ago.
Fast forward to 2022, there is now a handful of change management software in the market to assist with various work categories for the change manager. However, there is still ways to go in the understand of organisational change management in the marketplace. Compilations of change management software offering on the internet is usually a mixture of all types of software, many of which are not organisational change management in nature, and instead, technical change management (used by IT folks). For example https://orgmapper.com/change-management-tool/
How does a change management process help a company?
A change management process helps a company by providing a structured approach to minimizing disruptions and transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It minimizes resistance, enhances communication, and ensures that changes align with business goals, ultimately leading to smoother transitions and improved outcomes.
How can change management software help the change practitioner?
What is the implementation of change management?
The implementation of change management involves a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It includes strategies for managing resistance, communication plans, and training initiatives to ensure that changes are adopted effectively and sustainable within the organization.
Project change delivery
The vast majority of change management professionals in the industry are focused on delivering projects and implementing effective change management strategies to enable them to make an informed decision about their approach. It’s no wonder that most change management tools, including project management software and various change tools, are focused to support the entire change process and project delivery as a result, maintaining consistency throughout all initiatives. What are some of the areas in which project change delivery work can be made easier by software?
1. Automating change management deliverable work
A significant part of the work of change management professionals is spent on preparing for and documenting a clear roadmap of change management deliverables. These include detailed impact assessment, learning plan, stakeholder matrix, and type of change plans, etc. These deliverables are critical documents which are critical dependency for other project milestones. For example, stakeholder analysis and matrix is critical before broader stakeholder engagement can be made, since the analysis reveals who the stakeholders are and how they may be engaged throughout the change process.
One of the biggest pains faced by change management professionals is the amount of time required to manually create these deliverable documents. The work can be tedious, requiring weeks of manual work to complete. For example, the stakeholder matrix document can be a brain-numbing piece of activity, wading through a data dump of the organisational directory to determine every Tom, Dick and Harry which titles and names should be included in the stakeholder list for the project. Then, a lot of similar information then must be re-typed and entered into different versions in other change management deliverable documents such as detailed impact assessment or learning needs analysis, ultimately affecting customer satisfaction.
Software can automate much of the manual work involved. For example, Change Automator, a robust workflow automation software, allows the ease of use to link data already captured earlier on in the project, such as the relevant stakeholders matrix, with other change management deliverables such as detailed impact assessment, to ensure the right people are involved and to minimise manual re-work. With the ability to track changes, any data updated in one document will therefore update content in other documents, including integrations with tools like Power BI. This then saves on the tedious re-work required when data is updated or changes, which is pretty much a given throughout the project lifecycle. From a quality perspective, this also ensures any human-error is reduced in the data that should be synchronised across documents.
A common risk in change management delivery is that stakeholders may be left out inadvertently, or that a previously captured stakeholder in the stakeholder matrix is left out in the engagement process due to human-error. The impact of this type of error can be disastrous to the outcome of the project. Having cross-linked documents in one central place reduces the risk for this type of error.
2. Change management survey (readiness and adoption)
A key part of change management success is through careful monitoring of stakeholders throughout the change process to ensure visibility. In the earlier part of the project, this involves understanding to what extent stakeholders may be clear of the objectives of the project, their roles in it, and general awareness. Later on in the project, it could be more on understanding their engagement level of support which can be a predictor of ultimate adoption and overall support for the change. This overall change readiness level should be monitored across the project through surveys or interviews.
Surveys are inherently time consuming to design, administer and report manually. Significant time can be taken throughout each phase of the survey process. This is a no-brainer in terms of using a software tool. Most projects use Microsoft Forms or SurveyMonkey to do the job. However, you may want more robust features such as conditional question design, for example, if a respondent answers ‘yes’ for not supporting the change, then an additional question pops up to ask why.
Surveys can include sentiment analysis where the focus of the survey is on any shifts in stakeholder feelings and attitudes toward the project. In this case, it is critical to define in detail the characters of each stakeholder group in concern. These would then determine respondent characteristics to measure in the survey design.
There are also tools that measure employee sentiments through corporate social media channels such as Yammer and Teams. For example, Swoop Analytics can help to measure collaboration styles and other behavioural insights about how employees interact with each other on those channels. The data map can reveal key influencers and core influential network connectors.
The biggest value of change surveys lies in the reporting. Most survey tools offer fairly simple reporting using bar charts or pie charts. For short, simple surveys these may suffice. However, if you are working on a fairly detailed change adoption tracking survey, more advanced reporting features may be required. You may want to easily change the colour scheme of the chart, change different chart types, identify anomalies and trends, or highlight certain parts of the data to make it easier for your audience.
3. Project change reporting
Having the ease and flexibility of experimenting with different chart designs is critical for stakeholder impact. If you need hours of work to come up with a few charts the likelihood is that you will not bother. Some stakeholders may also have various personal preferences which can easily take significant time to modify. This is especially when you need the time to focus on engaging with your stakeholders, rather than tweaking excel spreadsheets.
Creating the right AI dashboard can create significant impact on stakeholders and help achieve your change objectives. Data speaks for itself and the right data visualisation can create memorable impact more than words alone. If you are driving toward change adoption, then having an AI-enhanced dashboard of core behaviour changes and tracked capability shifts, along with key metrics and key features, can act as a core part of change governance conversations. With a monthly cadence of reviewing these core data points, stakeholders can hold each other accountable to understand remaining work involved and zoom in on how to drive full change adoption.
Change reporting may not be limited to just survey results. Even seemingly ‘boring’ spreadsheet data such as detailed impact assessment may be easily turned into highly visual and interesting reports to help stakeholders understand what the changes mean and how different groups are impacted by the change.
One of the more popular ways in which change delivery has adopted software is in leveraging digital tools that provide functions to onboard or train users of new or changed systems. There are numerous providers in this area. These include WalkMe, UserGuiding, and Userlane.
Most of the tools provide similar functions to help walk users through interfaces of the system and even allow interactive experience where users can be tested in clicking on the right part of the system as a part of the training or onboarding process. The application is always for system interfaces since the tool only supports web-based systems.
Change capability
Another way in which change management software may assist change practitioners is in building change management capabilities related to change capability and documentation methodologies. There are various tools that help to measure, track, and report on change management activities and assess the impact of change initiatives, including key performance indicators and change impact analysis. This clarity could be that you would like to measure the change leadership skills of leaders, change alignment agility of stakeholder groups, or test employees as a part of skills assessment to ensure they have the right skills for the new system or process.
Using change management software, you can easily pre-program test items and answers to make it easy for yourself to score and tabulate audit test results without any manual work. You can also assign weightings to different questions to evaluate the capability of the respondent as a part of an assessment. You can even configure the assessment to provide results to the respondent at the end of the assessment, and email the feedback as well. Generally, these features are only offered as a part of a learning management system where significant time and effort is required to prepare the system for the assessment. Now, digital tools offer easy point-and-click features, with pre-configured templates saving you significant time and cost.
Change portfolio management
Managing a portfolio of initiatives used to be an approach only adopted by more mature organisations. However, with the rapid pace and intensity of changes, more and more organisations are adopting this approach to manage multiple initiatives.
Managing a portfolio of initiatives can only be done via data. There is already a myriad of project portfolio management systems in the market to help PMOs and project portfolio managers manage a slew of initiatives. The focus of project portfolio management systems is on project timelines, cost, resourcing, etc.
Change portfolio management focuses on the impact of changes and how they may impact the organisation across initiatives. There is also focus on change delivery resourcing and change capability development. One of the most critical pain points faced by organisations is change saturation and change fatigue. To better manage a portfolio of initiatives from a change perspective and manage potential change saturation, data is required.
Effective change portfolio management tools can help you:
Identify and plot change saturation points for different parts of the organisation
Identify risk levels of potential change saturation across roles, locations, layers of the organisations, etc.
Assess to what extent changes may be better delivered as an integrated package to one part of the organisation, or broken down to smaller, more digestable chunks
Assess to what extent changes may be better aligned and delivered through integrated messaging from an impacted stakeholder perspective (vs. from project perspective)
In summary, there are many strong reasons why change management professionals should adopt digital change management solutions to achieve greater change outcomes as well as to automate the tedious parts of the work to gain time to spend with stakeholders. With the ever increasing pace of digitisation in organisations, change management must also follow suit in digitising itself. Just as we could use modern fabrication techniques to build skyscrapers that are stronger and more resilient vs using traditional brick and mortar, so should change managers in leveraging digital tools to support digital transformations.
Managing multiple change initiatives is not a new concept nor is it new to organizations. What is perhaps ‘newer’ is how change practitioners are using data to manage multiple changes. Change practitioners that manage a portfolio of initiatives used to focus on building capability in various arenas from employee capability, leadership capability, through to the effectiveness of engagement and learning channels. However, using business and change management data to help companies is just as critical.
Is change management becoming more important?
Yes, change management is increasingly vital in today’s fast-paced business environment. Organizations face constant shifts in technology, market demands, and workforce dynamics, which impact their business processes. Effectively managing these changes helps minimize resistance, enhances employee engagement, and ensures smoother transitions, ultimately leading to improved performance and sustainability in a competitive landscape.
In this article, we will explore the top five challenges associated with the current approaches to managing multiple change initiatives, including the implementation of the change due to lack of resources and insufficient resources. We explore these common approaches and critique key challenges, along with alternatives.
Change heatmaps have become a popular tool for classifying departments based on the impact of a change initiative. However, two key issues often arise with this approach: the oversimplification of the traffic light classification system and the lack of granularity at the department level.
One of the most common ways to visually depict the impact of multiple changes is to use the heatmap. This is normally using a 3-point rating system (high, medium, low) to determine the level of impact across the various departments across the organisation. Whilst the rating process is an easy exercise, there are some very serious challenges:
Even for the 3 level rating system the change practitioner may be challenged with how this rating is determined and what it is based on. Not every team within the same department may be equally impacted
There may be different impacts for different roles within the same team and department
The impact may be different depending on whether the focus is on employees, customers, process, system or partner
Typically most use a monthly rating scale. However, for busy organisations with lots of changes, the change volume may go up and down within the same month. With one rating it oversimplifies what actually happens throughout the month
With only 3 levels of ratings, a lot of departments end up having the same rating level for months, meaning there is not much they can do with this data.
In Summary, the summarised monthly rating for one department indicates medium-level change. But at what time of the month, for what role, for what team, and for what type of impact?
The below is an example of a change heatmap from the University of California, Berkeley.
a. Traffic Light Classification Too Simplistic:
The traditional red, yellow, and green traffic light system used in change heatmaps is a simple way to communicate the status of a department’s readiness for change. However, this simplicity can be misleading. Red may indicate a problem, but it does not provide insights into the nature or severity of the issue. Likewise, green may suggest readiness, but it might hide underlying complexities or dependencies.
Even for the 3 level rating system the change practitioner may be challenged with how this rating is determined and what fact it is based on. Also, the impact may be different depending on whether the focus is on employees, customers, process, system or partner. Typically most use a monthly rating scale. However, for busy organisations with lots of changes, the change volume may go up and down within the same month. With one rating it oversimplifies what actually happens throughout the month. Even if the singular departmental rating is split into rating by initiative, this does not provide an aggregate department-level rating that is aggregated based on logic.
To overcome this challenge, organizations need a more nuanced classification system that takes into account the specific issues within each category. This could involve incorporating additional colours or using a numerical scale to better represent the diversity and complexity of challenges within each department.
b. Department Level Not Granular Enough:
While change heatmaps provide a high-level overview, they often lack the granularity required to understand the specific challenges within each department. Different teams within a department may be impacted differently, and a broad classification may not capture these variations.
To address this issue, organizations should consider adopting a more detailed classification system that breaks down each department into its constituent parts. This granular approach allows for a more targeted and effective change management strategy, addressing specific issues at the team and role levels.
In Summary, the singular monthly rating for one department indicates medium-level change. But at what time of the month, for what role, for what team, and for what type of impact?
2) Using Project Milestone Roadmap to Sequence Impacts
Project milestone roadmaps are commonly used to sequence the impacts of change initiatives. However, this approach faces challenges in terms of the sufficiency of milestones and the difficulty of overlaying multiple capacity considerations.
Below is an example from Praxis Framework.
a. Milestones Are Not Sufficient vs Overall Aggregate Impact Levels:
While project milestones provide a structured timeline for change initiatives, they may not capture the full scope of the impact on the organization. Engaging key stakeholders is essential during this process, as milestones often focus on project-specific tasks and may overlook broader organizational changes that occur concurrently. For example, adoption may require months and is not a single point-in-time milestone per se.
To overcome this limitation, organizations should supplement milestone roadmaps with an overall aggregate impact assessment. This holistic view ensures that the sequence of milestones aligns with the broader organizational objectives and minimizes conflicts between concurrent initiatives.
b. Difficulty of Overlaying Multiple Capacity Considerations:
Managing multiple change initiatives requires a delicate balance of resources, and overlaying capacity considerations can be challenging due to the scope of the change. Project milestone roadmaps may not adequately address the interdependencies and additional resources needed due to the resource constraints that arise when multiple initiatives are in progress simultaneously.
To enhance capacity planning, organizations should invest in advanced project management tools that allow for the dynamic adjustment of timelines based on resource availability. This ensures a realistic and achievable sequencing of impacts, taking into account the organization’s overall capacity.
3) Relying Purely on Excel and PowerPoint to Manage Multiple Change Initiatives
While Excel and PowerPoint are ubiquitous tools in the business world, relying solely on them to manage multiple change initiatives presents challenges related to the agile nature of changes and the difficulty of having interactive data-based conversations. This is especially the case that most change initiatives are digital changes, and yet they are been managed using non-digital means? How can change practitioners ‘be the change’ when they are using dated ways of driving digital change?
a. Agile Nature of Changes Means Ongoing Updates Are Required:
Change initiatives are inherently dynamic, and their requirements can evolve rapidly, especially in response to market shifts. Excel and PowerPoint, while useful for static reporting, lack the real-time collaborative capabilities needed to accommodate the agile nature of changes while maintaining the status quo.
To address this challenge, organizations should consider adopting change management and collaboration tools that enable real-time updates and collaboration. Cloud-based platforms provide the flexibility to make ongoing adjustments, ensuring that stakeholders are always working with the latest information.
b. Difficulty of Having Interactive Data-Based Conversations and Federated Model of Change Data:
Excel and PowerPoint may struggle to facilitate interactive discussions around change data. As organizations increasingly operate in a federated model, with dispersed teams working on different aspects of change initiatives, a more collaborative and integrated approach is essential.
Implementing dedicated change management platforms that support interactive data-based discussions can enhance collaboration and provide a centralized repository for change-related information. This ensures that all stakeholders have access to the latest data, fostering a more transparent and collaborative change management process.
4) Preparing Business Operations Readiness for the Amount of Change
Preparing business operations for a significant amount of change requires a strategic approach that incorporates capacity and time considerations while maintaining granularity in data.
a. Using Business Operations Speak: Capacity, resources, time.
Business operations readiness is often discussed in terms of capacity and time. However, the challenge lies in translating these concepts into actionable plans. Capacity planning involves understanding the organization’s ability to absorb change without compromising existing operations, while time considerations are crucial for ensuring a smooth transition without disruptions.
Change practitioners need to distill the ‘ask of the business’ in business speak. Business stakeholders may not be interested in the various classifications of change or the varying degrees of cultural changes involved. What they are interested in is what you want from my team, how much time you need them to dedicate, and for what team members, so that they can plan accordingly.
b. Granularity of Data:
The granularity of data is essential for effective business operations readiness. Generic metrics may not capture the specific needs and challenges of individual departments or teams, leading to oversights that can impact the success of change initiatives.
Implementing a comprehensive data collection and analysis strategy that considers the unique requirements of each business unit ensures a more accurate understanding of operational readiness. This granularity allows organizations to tailor change management strategies to specific needs, enhancing the likelihood of successful implementation.
5) Getting Executive Engagement and Decision Making
Ensuring executive engagement and decision-making is critical for the success of change initiatives. However, achieving this engagement poses its own set of challenges.
To overcome this challenge, organizations should:
Establish Clear Governance and Engagement Channels:
Ensure that there is in place a clear governance bodies making decisions on the overall control of successful change initiatives across the organisation, focusing on the success of the change. A robust communication strategy ensures that communication channels between change management teams and executives are also well-defined and effective. Regular updates and transparent reporting on the progress and challenges of change initiatives build trust and encourage executive engagement.
Align Change Initiatives with Strategic Objectives:
Demonstrate the alignment of change initiatives with key performance indicators related to the organization’s strategic goals and objectives. Executives are more likely to engage when they see how a particular change contributes to the overall success of the organization and its growth.
Provide Decision-Making Frameworks:
Equip executives with decision-making frameworks that guide them through the complexities of change initiatives. Clearly defined criteria for evaluating the success of a change, along with potential risks and mitigation strategies, empower executives to make informed decisions.
Highlight the Business Impact:
Clearly articulate the business impact of change initiatives. Executives are more likely to engage when they understand the tangible benefits and potential risks associated with a particular change. Use data and analytics to support the business case for change.
Offer Ongoing Support and Education:
Ensure that executives have the necessary support and training to navigate the complexities of change management at all levels of the organization. This includes providing relevant information, resources, and sufficient time to help them make informed decisions and actively participate in the change process, especially regarding new processes. Creating ‘bite-sized’ and summarised insights is key for executives.
Effectively managing multiple change initiatives is a complex task that requires a holistic and adaptive approach. By addressing the challenges of change management, including change management obstacles associated with classification, sequencing, tool reliance, business operations readiness, and executive engagement, organizations can enhance their change management strategies and increase the likelihood of successful outcomes, ultimately maintaining a competitive edge. Embracing innovative tools, fostering collaboration, and maintaining a strategic focus on organizational goals are key elements in overcoming these challenges and navigating the ever-evolving landscape of change.
In this article, we’ve stressed the importance of data. You may wonder about the amount of time and effort required to establish all the various points mentioned in the article and if this is even doable. Well, using Excel and other static non-digital ways of managing change data will mean a significant volume of work, and even then it may not provide a clear picture that gives you the various cuts of data required to drive meaningful conversations. Resort to automation provided by change management software such as The Change Compass to assist in data capture, data analysis, and dashboard generation.
Change portfolio management is the discipline of viewing, governing and sequencing every concurrent change initiative across an organisation as a single connected system rather than as a collection of independent projects. It looks across financial, operational, technology, regulatory and people-side changes, then makes decisions about timing, resource allocation, intervention and sequencing based on the cumulative impact on each business unit. The seven best practices that distinguish high-performing organisations from those that struggle include treating portfolio intelligence as governance rather than reporting, sequencing changes by stakeholder absorption capacity, measuring saturation continuously rather than at point-in-time, and integrating portfolio data into executive decision rhythms.
Managing a set of change initiatives through a systematic approach in the project intake process and portfolio management process, often outlined in a table of contents, is relatively new for some organizations. This strategic approach is drawn from the portfolio project management method by dividing a set of initiatives into different teams and viewing various project ideas and initiatives in unison. By doing this, organizations can make more informed decisions, allowing things to become more manageable from the perspective of planning how to organize the strategic objectives and business goals of the planning and sequencing of these changes.
Project portfolio managers are focused on investment funding, program management, governance, project execution, project selection, and resource allocation, including selecting the best individual projects related to the best projects and those related projects endeavors. For portfolio change managers, there are similar focus areas such as change program management, change initiative execution, resource management, and quality assurance. However, there are also several marked differences, including a focus on business change governance, business change capability, change leadership, and change tools and methodology.
In practice, there is often a wide range of practices in the service delivery and model of portfolio change management. Some focus purely on supporting project delivery and provide valuable insights, and in the process fail to uplift business change capability. Others tend to focus on general change capability through training and development and very little on change governance and supporting strategy implementation.
So, what are some of the best practices in strategic portfolio management that align with strategic organizational goals and change portfolio management by coordinating with individual project managers in achieving a strategic portfolio of projects that support strategic goals and overall business strategy? How does the change portfolio management function position itself to be strategic, value-adding, and seen as a driver of business results? Here are 10 best practices.
1. Use hard data.
A lot of change professionals often shy away from data. We prefer to focus on behavior, leadership, mindsets, norms, and culture. Whilst the ‘soft’ things may matter we need to be comfortable in working with data. Peter Drucker’s famous saying goes ‘What gets measured gets done’.
Disciplines with a strong focus on data usually have a strong seat at the business table. For example, Finance, Operations, and Sales. Even Marketing is not just about creative ideas and concepts, but there is a strong focus on cost, revenue forecast, and customer responses. Armed with data that drives business decisions you get a strong seat at the decision-making table.
What types of data should portfolio change managers focus on? The standard change measures include training attendance, stakeholder ratings, and arbitrary business readiness ratings. To really demonstrate value, portfolio change managers need to turn change management into a science and be able to quantify change to inform investment decisions effectively. Change Impacts is one great example. By quantifying change impacts into discrete units one can start to measure and understand what changes are and how they move over time and across different parts of the business.
2. Link change practices with business outcomes
Continuing from the previous point – armed with quantitative change impact data, the portfolio change manager is able to analyze the data to find any correlations between change impact data and business performance data. This can become a very powerful picture to take to the senior management team – drawing out the impact of changes on business performance.
Based on data from The Change Compass. An organization has been able to draw significant correlations between change impacts and customer satisfaction levels. This has since raised meaningful discussions regarding the approach of implementing changes and how to mitigate any potential negative impacts on the customer experience. It does not necessarily mean minimize on change impacts on the customer. Instead, it challenges the group to think through how to better engage and prepare for the customer to transition through changes. This is a great example of demonstrating the importance of linking change impacts with business outcomes.
3. Focus on building change capability more than just execution
A lot of organizations treat change management as only discrete pieces of work that need to be carried out as a part of a project. With this approach, these organizations have hired mainly contractors with some permanent change managers purely focused on project execution. Whilst this work is absolutely required to successfully land initiatives, these resources come and go and in the end, the organization is often no better off in managing change.
Instead, there needs to be a continual focus on developing business change capability. This may be carried out in different ways. With each project implementation, the change manager may focus on uplifting change management capabilities in the business within its leaders. Effective engagement and learning channels can be established to better aid the deployment of change initiatives. These include self-paced training systems, know-how regarding establishing and measuring various learning interventions, and different types of employee engagement channels, both face-to-face and digital.
As change portfolio managers, a concerted focus on embedding business change capability can ensure that the business becomes more mature at undergoing change. A strategic plan can be developed that includes different ways of targeting capability uplift and change maturity. This requires business sponsorship and focus. It is also a critical part of effective operational management.
4. Design and manage change governance
Establishing effective change governance does not mean complicated multi-level governance with lots of documentation, policies, and procedures and lots of headcounts to manage the processes. Change governance means having the right processes to ensure there is sufficient oversight and visibility on what changes are going to happen and the effectiveness of change delivery.
Different organizations will establish different governance processes to suit the particular cultural and business environment. However, at the most basic level, there should be a regular cadence where managers can see and visualize the changes that are going to happen, and discuss any risks and issues with the picture they are seeing. At the same cadence, there should also be a review of the previous changes and how they’ve been rolled out, with a view to identifying opportunities for improvement.
There should also be different levels of change governance for larger organizations. For a business unit, there should be a change governance focusing on changes within the business unit. There should also be an enterprise-level change governance focused on changes across the organization. At the enterprise level, the discussion will be on strategic initiatives that run across the company. There should also be discussions on any risks and issues with business readiness and the progress of the change.
A standard meeting agenda for change governance would include the following:
Review the previous month’s changes including callouts of highlights, challenges, employee engagement, results, and overall progress
Examining metrics around the amount of change and to what extent the level of changes can be digested by the business appropriately
Identifying potential contentions of concurrent changes within the plan. If concurrent changes are being released into the business, discussions should zoom in on the quantum and nature of change contention, rationale as to why the business may not be able to handle the volume of changes, and implications if the releases were to proceed
Examining the data to ensure that all changes are captured and there is nothing missing. Change data should contain key projects being implemented, BAU changes, and other corporate programs from groups such as IT or HR
Examining the overall upcoming change slate and identify upcoming risks and opportunities as a part of risk management. Opportunities may include potential gaps where there is very little change, and where there may be opportunities for initiatives to land
5. Leverage digital tools
Change portfolio managers manage the slate of projects using a structured process of funding, prioritization, analysis, and review based on data, ensuring strategic alignment with business objectives and maximizing business value. In a similar vein, so should change portfolio managers, particularly when considering insights from project proposals and a project management office. The power that change managers have is not around cost or schedule data; it is on change impact and change readiness as discrete data points, including the crucial role of the contributions of team members. The challenge is how to collect, analyze, present, and leverage the power of these data.
The Change Compass is a change portfolio management software that quantifies and packages change impacts into data that can be easily analyzed and presented in various visual formats to decision-makers in real time, as a part of effective portfolio management. Visuals are specifically designed to make people change decisions, and are not just simple headlamps or Gantt charts. Initiative owners who own the source of the information update change impact data. Up-to-date change impact project data can be accessed at any time with reporting generated automatically. The portfolio change manager can easily dissect, drill down, and cut data to find out the change health of the portfolio:
Is there too much change?
How is our staffing resource impacted by change activities (especially for resource-sensitive areas such as call centres)
What’s the change tolerance level for the business?
How are various stakeholder groups impacted by the changes?
How are initiatives under particular strategic themes impacting the business?
How are customers and their respective experiences impacted by our initiatives?
6. Examine customer impacts
At a portfolio level, it is not sufficient to just focus on internal employee and stakeholder impacts. The change portfolio management team manager also needs to place focus on how are customers impacted by the planned changes. This drives at the core of the focus of a lot of the organizations on the customer.
One large financial services organization that was focused on customer experiences started analyzing data on customer change impacts across initiatives. Through this, there was a significant realization that the same group of customers was impacted by 6 significant initiatives at the same time. Across each of these initiatives, there was no coordination and the silo approach meant that poor synchronization and coordination could lead to a very poor customer experience. Subsequently, new roles and remits were created to manage this customer experience through facilitating a coordinated approach to planning and implementing initiative rollout.
7. Iterative planning
Iterative planning is a core of agile ways of working. At the core of iterative planning is the belief that we don’t always know the solution that we are striving for at the beginning of the change initiative. It is when we start testing and getting feedback from users that we are able to refine our proposal and be able to come up with a solution that suits the organization.
To truly support agile ways of working, change management needs to be able to develop prototypes of the change approach, and be able to morph or tweak the approach as required based on feedback. For example, a change approach can be tested on a particular team, the change champion group, or a selected trial group. Communication and engagement approaches as well as learning approaches can be tested in these groups.
Want to learn more about managing change portfolios?
If you’re ready to start to manage a portfolio of change initiatives using data and insights, have a chat to us about how to leverage The Change Compass capabilities to help you pinpoint key risks and opportunities in managing across initiatives. To book a demo click here.
Enterprise change management reporting is changing. In today’s dynamic business environment, it no longer consists of general updates on organisational change management efforts, change leaders, streams of project progress, or updates on various change capability training session volumes and satisfaction rates. Executives are demanding more value from enterprise change functions that incorporate change management practices and digital transformation, leveraging new tools. The pace of change since Covid has not slowed down. For many, it has increased in pace and volume. To gain better insight into how the change management function is supporting the success of organisations, reports and dashboards have often become a visible linchpin of what value enterprise change management delivers.
What is enterprise change management and why is it important?
Enterprise change management refers to the structured approach organizations use to manage the people side of change in organizational change management, including the types of organizational change in processes, systems, and personnel across an entire organization, while integrating risk management principles. It’s crucial for minimizing disruption, ensuring smooth transitions, and enhancing employee engagement. Effective change management fosters resilience, boosts productivity, and aligns teams with organizational goals for sustained success.
What is enterprise change management and why is it important?
Enterprise change management refers to the structured approach organizations use to manage changes in processes, technologies, and organizational structures, including various type of change efforts that relate to the levels of change management. It’s crucial for minimizing resistance and ensuring smooth transitions. Effective change management enhances employee engagement, drives project success, and fosters a culture of adaptability within the organization.
Having the right content and format for your enterprise reports can make or break your reputation in the realm of information technology. Do it right and you could start a ripple of high-impact and strategic conversations across senior stakeholders that drive focus on improving change. You can be in the spotlight in influencing change leadership and the achievement of change and transformation goals. Do it wrong and you may never have another opportunity to have the room to talk about change management to senior leaders. You may be associated with not providing much value and too ‘operational’.
At its core, enterprise change management reporting goes beyond merely tracking progress. It encompasses a holistic approach that considers various factors crucial to the success of organizational initiatives. While monitoring progress, readiness, and the amount of work done may be interesting components, true impact comes from focusing on impacts, adoption and predictors for benefit realization.
Executives and stakeholders are not just interested in receiving progress updates; they seek insights into the likelihood of initiative success and the potential risks that may impede desired outcomes. These risks extend beyond project timelines and budget constraints to encompass broader business implications such as performance impacts, capacity constraints, prioritization effectiveness, and the sustainability of behavioural change.
Impacts of change:
Quantifying and visualising impacts are not new to change practitioners. The key is how the data is presented over time. A lot of change practitioners would settle with a standard heatmap based on personal ratings. This does not deliver much value as the data cannot be easily substantiated by evidence (since it is more of a finger in the air estimation). Standard heatmaps also are too high level and does not really support key decision making.
Decision making requires specific data points such as:
Change saturation or change tolerance levels (these levels need to be substantiated based on business indicator reference to justify the levels, and not be someone’s personal opinion)
What division, team, role and which week the saturation points are forecasted
Corresponding data on what initiatives, and their respective impact activities that contribute to the saturation risk, and therefore proposed options
A key part of representing change impacts should not just be at an operational level, which is more concerned about capacity and bandwidth. Impact should also be tied to strategic levers, portfolio types, benefit types and readiness.
Predictive Indicators for Success:
To create impactful change management reports, organizations must incorporate predictive indicators that go beyond change volume and risk assessment. These indicators should provide insights into business performance, strategy achievement, and the realization of intended benefits.
These are some of the ways you can incorporate predictive indicators:
Forecast lines. With sufficient data you can forecast such as impact or capacity levels (which may be seasonal), or even readiness levels across the initiative lifecycle historically across initiatives.
The types of factors that can be included as predictive indicators can include readiness. It could be that readiness levels only get lifted just before go live or at go live. Adoption levels can also be forecasted if you have trend data across initiatives
Change tolerance levels across different parts of the business can also be seen as a predictive way of forecasting how much capacity there is for change beyond which saturation may be a key risk
Adoption and Behaviour Tracking:
Central to successful change management is the adoption and sustained implementation of new processes or technologies. Tracking adoption rates, user engagement, and behavioural changes are crucial indicators of initiative success. However, it’s essential to strike a balance between capturing relevant metrics and overwhelming stakeholders with unnecessary data.
Capturing behaviour change data can be key for larger initiatives or transformations. Behavioural change can be central in a range of changes such as customer centricity, efficiency, team collaboration or effectiveness. Measuring key behaviour changes that drive the initiative outcome the most is critical. For example, having effective conversations with customers to improve customer experience is a behaviour that can be rated, tracked and reported. Depending on the change, there may also be system features that can aid the tracking of these behaviours.
Effective change management goes hand in hand with strategic alignment, strategic goals, and necessary resources for strategic objectives. Reports should assess how initiatives contribute to overarching business objectives and whether they align with the rest of the organization’s strategic direction in the first place. Business leaders can utilize metrics related to revenue growth, cost savings, customer satisfaction, and employee productivity to provide valuable insights into the impact of change initiatives on business performance.
You can also link your change impacts to each strategic lever. In this way you can visually show the size of the impact per strategic lever. This will give your executives a way to examine whether the right level of impacts in the right areas of business are planned as a part of the course of each strategic lever.
The other angle is to visually show the pace of change against the strategic levers. Are certain key initiatives being driven at the right pace at the right time? Will the velocity of change exceed the ability of the business to absorb the changes? Or is the velocity not sufficiently meeting leadership expectations?
Benefit Realization:
Ultimately, the success of change initiatives is measured by their ability to deliver tangible benefits and assess the impact of the change. Change management reports should include key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that track the progress of change initiatives and the realization of expected benefits, whether they are financial gains, process efficiencies, or competitive advantages. By monitoring benefit realization, organizations can course-correct as needed and ensure that investments in change deliver the intended outcomes.
A key responsibility for change is to focus on those foreward looking measures that predict eventual benefit realisation, including readiness, adoption, engagement and behaviour change. Be sure to link these specifically to high benefit initiatives to provide strategic oversight.
Balancing Complexity and Clarity:
While incorporating a diverse range of metrics is essential for comprehensive reporting, it’s equally important to maintain clarity and focus. Reports should be structured in a way that highlights key insights and trends without overwhelming stakeholders with excessive detail. Visualizations such as charts, graphs, and dashboards can help distill complex data into actionable insights, facilitating informed decision-making at all levels of the organization.
All aspects of chart and dashboard designs are critical. These range from colour scheme chosen, number of charts, commentary, titles, legends, sequencing of charts, and type of charts chosen all act to either contribute to simplicity and clarity or complexity and confusion. Your narrative as you talk through the charts also plays a key role in building the story-line, and simplifying the key messages and actions you would like to impart to the audience.
Charts and dashboards tell a story and in presenting them you should always incorporate any actions required from the audience. If this is not done then it will always remain a FYI. FYI content will be deemed lower in the value curve over time and your stakeholders will lose interest. Instead, you should work on crafting a continual story that ebbs and flows. The following are key questions you should be asking when crafting you ongoing charts and dashboards:
Is there an emerging risk or opportunity that warrants specific focus for this month?
How are we tracking the effectiveness of stakeholder actions through data? This feedback loop is critical and gives your stakeholders a reference point for their own effectiveness
Is your data-based story uni-dimensional? Are there other dimensions beyond what you have been presenting that stakeholder should be aware of?
Are you giving stakeholders what they are most interested in? Whether it be strategic success progress, or benefit realisation?
Are you presenting change data in a holistic way in terms of how the business is run? Vs. just focused on standard change management function-specific metrics such as training sessions, or number of workshops completed?
Enterprise change management reporting is a critical tool for navigating the complexities of organizational change. By focusing on predictive indicators, including adoption and behavior tracking, business performance alignment, and benefit realization, organizations can unlock the full potential of their change management initiatives. However, achieving impactful reporting requires a careful balance between complexity and clarity, ensuring that stakeholders receive actionable insights without being inundated with unnecessary information. Ultimately, by harnessing the power of enterprise change management reporting, organizations can drive successful outcomes and thrive in an ever-evolving business landscape.
To find out more about enterprise change management reporting leveraging digital automation and analytics chat to us here.
Enterprise change management reporting refers to the systematic reporting of change management data across an organisation’s full portfolio of change initiatives – not just individual programme updates. It provides leadership with visibility of the total volume and complexity of change the organisation is absorbing, the adoption performance across all major programmes, and the change capacity available to absorb further change. Enterprise reporting is the foundation of a mature, data-driven approach to change governance.
How does enterprise change reporting differ from programme-level change reporting?
Programme-level change reports focus on the readiness, adoption, and risk status of a single change initiative. Enterprise change reports aggregate data across all programmes to show the full picture of change load, resource deployment, and adoption performance at the organisational level. Enterprise reporting answers questions that programme-level reporting cannot: which employee groups are over-saturated with change? Which programmes are competing for the same people’s attention? Is the organisation’s change capacity sufficient for the current and planned change portfolio?
What data do you need for enterprise change management reporting?
Enterprise change reporting requires three types of data: change portfolio data (what changes are being delivered, to whom, and on what timeline), change impact data (the level of disruption each change creates for each affected employee group), and adoption data (the rate at which changes are being adopted across the organisation). Collecting and aggregating this data manually is extremely difficult at enterprise scale – a purpose-built change management platform is typically required to make enterprise reporting sustainable and credible.
How to measure change saturation: a practical methodology for enterprise change functions
Most organisations can feel change saturation before they can prove it. Leaders sense that employees are struggling, change managers notice adoption slipping, and business partners start raising concerns about “too much at once.” But when it comes to quantifying the problem, securing executive attention, or making a credible case for adjusting programme sequencing, feeling is not enough.
Measurement changes that dynamic entirely. An organisation that can measure change saturation can demonstrate it, act on it, and prevent it from quietly undermining transformation outcomes. An organisation that cannot measure it is stuck responding to symptoms rather than causes.
This article sets out a practical methodology for measuring change saturation in enterprise environments: what to measure, how to score it, what the data tells you, and how to turn the output into decisions that protect adoption and reduce change fatigue.
Why change saturation is so difficult to measure
The challenge with measuring change saturation is that it is not a single variable. It is an emergent condition that arises from the interaction between several variables: the volume of concurrent changes landing on a group, the intensity of each change, and the capacity of the group to absorb them. None of these is directly observable in isolation.
Volume is relatively straightforward to count: how many programmes are actively affecting this group right now? But volume without intensity gives you an incomplete picture. A group managing two major system replacements simultaneously is more saturated than a group managing ten minor policy updates. And both assessments are useless unless they are calibrated against capacity: a high-performing change champion network in a well-managed business unit with experienced managers can absorb more than a stretched team in the middle of a restructure.
Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management research found that 73% of organisations surveyed were near, at, or beyond the saturation point. The reason that number is so high is not that organisations are careless. It is that most organisations have no systematic way to see saturation building before it becomes critical.
The three dimensions of a change saturation measurement model
A rigorous methodology for measuring change saturation needs to address all three dimensions: load, intensity, and capacity.
Dimension 1: Change load
Change load is the quantitative foundation of saturation measurement. It answers the question: how much change is being asked of this group, across all programmes, right now?
Calculating change load requires a portfolio-level view. For each group of employees, you need to know:
How many programmes are currently in active delivery (preparation, go-live, or post-go-live embedding)
The size of the group and the proportion affected by each programme
The timeline of each programme’s peak demand periods
A simple change load index can be constructed by assigning each programme a weight (based on the size and duration of its demand on the group) and summing those weights for each group across the current period. The output is a comparative score: Group A has a load index of 4.2, Group B has a load index of 1.8. High-load groups are immediate candidates for deeper investigation.
Dimension 2: Change intensity
Not all changes demand the same cognitive and behavioural adjustment. Change intensity measures how disruptive each individual programme is to the employees it affects. A robust intensity assessment covers the following dimensions:
Process change: Are employees being asked to follow materially different processes or procedures?
System change: Are new technologies being introduced that require new skills and habits?
Role change: Are roles being restructured, responsibilities shifting, or reporting lines changing?
Behavioural change: Are fundamental ways of working or cultural norms being challenged?
Location and environment: Are physical working arrangements changing?
Each dimension is typically scored on a scale of one to five: one meaning minimal adjustment required, five meaning radical shift. The total intensity score for a programme across all dimensions provides a standardised basis for comparison that goes well beyond “major” and “minor” labels.
When intensity scores are multiplied by the number of people affected, you get a weighted impact figure that can be aggregated across all programmes to give a cumulative impact score for any stakeholder group.
Dimension 3: Absorption capacity
Absorption capacity is the most subjective of the three dimensions, but it is also the most important for calibrating risk. Two groups facing identical change load and intensity may have very different actual saturation risk depending on their current capacity to absorb change.
Factors that increase absorption capacity include: a recent track record of successful change adoption, strong and engaged line managers who actively support transitions, low current business workload, a stable team structure, and access to dedicated change support resources.
Factors that reduce absorption capacity include: recent history of poorly managed change, a restructure or leadership transition in the past twelve months, high current business workload or seasonal pressure, high attrition in the period, and limited manager availability.
Capacity can be assessed using a structured scoring approach: assign each factor a weight and a score, sum the results, and produce a capacity index. When capacity is low and load is high, the saturation risk calculation shifts dramatically.
Combining the three dimensions: the saturation risk score
Once you have load, intensity, and capacity scores for each stakeholder group, you can combine them into a single saturation risk score. The formula is straightforward in principle:
Saturation Risk = (Change Load x Average Intensity) / Absorption Capacity
Groups with a high numerator (high load and high intensity) and a low denominator (low capacity) are at the greatest risk of saturation. Groups with moderate load, moderate intensity, and high capacity may be managing comfortably.
The specific weighting and calibration of this formula will vary by organisation. The important thing is that the formula is applied consistently across all groups and time periods so that comparisons are meaningful. An organisation that calculates saturation risk scores every quarter develops a trend view: is this group’s score rising, stable, or declining? That trend view is often more actionable than any single data point.
Gartner’s research on change fatigue identifies the cascading effects of high saturation: employee intent to stay declines by up to 42% and individual performance can fall by up to 27%. Having a risk score that flags these conditions before they materialise is what gives organisations time to intervene.
Leading indicators: what to watch before saturation becomes critical
Quantitative load, intensity, and capacity scores are the analytical foundation. But they are only as useful as the data that feeds them. Leading indicators provide an early warning layer that flags emerging saturation risk in real time.
The most reliable leading indicators for change saturation include:
Readiness assessment scores: If stakeholder readiness surveys are showing declining confidence in the same groups across multiple programmes, that is a strong signal of emerging saturation even before adoption data confirms it.
Support ticket volume and type: A spike in “how do I” tickets, process queries, or errors in a group that has recently gone through multiple changes indicates that new ways of working are not yet embedded.
Manager-reported concerns: Direct reports from line managers about team overload, confusion about priorities, or declining morale are a ground-level signal that formal data often misses.
Participation rates in change activities: Declining attendance at training sessions, communications open rates falling, or drop-off in workshop participation are early indicators that employees are starting to disengage from change processes.
Pulse survey sentiment: Structured short-cycle surveys asking employees specifically about their change experience, not just general engagement, can surface saturation signals weeks before adoption metrics deteriorate.
The value of these indicators is in their combination. Any single signal can have alternative explanations. When multiple leading indicators are moving in the same direction for the same group, the probability of saturation risk is high.
Lagging indicators: confirming what the leading indicators predicted
If saturation goes undetected or unmanaged, it will eventually show up in lagging indicators. These are retrospective: they confirm that saturation has already occurred, rather than giving you time to prevent it.
Key lagging indicators include:
Adoption rates below threshold: If post-go-live adoption data shows that target behaviours are not being sustained at expected levels, saturation is one of the most common root causes.
Benefits realisation shortfalls: When programmes that expected to deliver financial or operational outcomes within a defined period consistently fall short, compounded change load is often a contributing factor.
Attrition spikes in high-change groups: Research from Prosci identifies that 54% of employees experiencing change fatigue actively look for a new role. Voluntary attrition data disaggregated by group and correlated with change load data can confirm saturation impact after the fact.
Quality or error rate increases: In operational groups going through system or process changes, a measurable increase in errors or rework can indicate that employees are not yet proficient in the new ways of working.
Tracking lagging indicators matters for two reasons. First, they close the loop on the saturation risk methodology: if your risk scores correctly predicted the groups that experienced adoption failure, your model is calibrated well. Second, they provide the evidence base for executive conversations about saturation impact, which is often necessary before organisations will invest in prevention.
Building a change saturation dashboard
Measurement only creates value when it is visible to the people who can act on it. A change saturation dashboard serves as the primary communication tool for the enterprise change function, translating complex multi-variable analysis into a format that programme sponsors, business unit leaders, and transformation executives can consume quickly.
An effective saturation dashboard includes:
Portfolio heat map by group: A matrix showing which stakeholder groups are carrying the highest change load in the current quarter, with colour coding indicating saturation risk levels.
Trend lines for high-risk groups: For groups flagged as high-risk, a rolling view of their saturation score over the past two to four quarters.
Programme convergence view: A calendar-based visualisation showing where multiple programmes are landing on the same groups in the same window.
Leading indicator summary: A consolidated view of the current readings on key leading indicators, with flagging for any that are trending in a concerning direction.
Intervention log: A record of what saturation management interventions have been initiated, by whom, and for which groups.
This kind of visibility transforms saturation management from a reactive exercise into a governance function. When the dashboard is presented regularly to the portfolio governance committee, saturation risk becomes a standing agenda item alongside cost, schedule, and scope.
Practical tools for saturation measurement at scale
For enterprise change functions managing ten or more concurrent programmes, the practical challenge of measuring saturation is significant. The data collection, aggregation, and analysis required to maintain a current, accurate view of saturation risk across a complex portfolio cannot be managed sustainably in spreadsheets.
Change Compass is built specifically for this challenge. The platform provides enterprise change functions with a centralised data infrastructure for capturing change impact and load across the portfolio, automated aggregation of cumulative change demand by stakeholder group, and real-time visualisation of saturation risk. Rather than manually compiling data from twelve different programme SharePoint sites, change managers can work from a single source of truth that surfaces portfolio-level risk automatically.
For change teams in the early stages of building measurement capability, starting with the Change Compass weekly demo is a practical way to see what portfolio-level saturation measurement looks like in practice before committing to a platform investment.
Making measurement actionable: from scores to decisions
The ultimate purpose of measuring change saturation is not to produce scores. It is to produce better decisions about how the change portfolio is managed. A saturation risk score that sits in a report and is never acted on has no value.
The decisions that saturation measurement should be driving include:
Sequencing decisions: When high-risk groups are identified, programme governance should have a mechanism to delay or phase go-live dates for lower-priority programmes to reduce peak load.
Resourcing decisions: Groups identified as high-risk may require additional change support capacity, including dedicated practitioners, enhanced manager coaching, or intensified communication.
Scope decisions: When sequencing is not possible, MVP thinking applied to change scope can reduce the intensity of individual programmes landing on high-risk groups.
Reporting decisions: High-risk groups should be on the executive sponsor radar, with regular updates on saturation indicators and intervention progress.
Prosci’s research on change management metrics consistently identifies that organisations that actively measure and act on change data are significantly more likely to meet or exceed their project objectives. The measurement methodology matters, but the governance mechanism that turns measurement into action matters just as much.
Where to start: a phased approach to building saturation measurement capability
Most enterprise change functions cannot build a full saturation measurement system overnight. The most practical approach is phased.
Phase 1: Establish the data foundation. Standardise the change impact assessment template across all programmes so that group-level impact data is collected in a consistent, comparable format. Without this, aggregation is impossible.
Phase 2: Build the portfolio view. Map all active and upcoming programmes against the employee population in a shared register. Identify which groups are affected by more than two significant changes in the next quarter.
Phase 3: Add the intensity layer. For the highest-load groups identified in Phase 2, conduct structured intensity assessments for each programme affecting them. Calculate cumulative intensity scores.
Phase 4: Introduce capacity assessment. Develop a structured capacity scoring instrument for the highest-risk groups. Combine load, intensity, and capacity scores into a risk index.
Phase 5: Automate and sustain. Move from manual calculation to platform-supported aggregation and visualisation, so that saturation risk is maintained as a live view rather than a quarterly exercise.
The organisations that manage change saturation most effectively are those that started this journey early enough to have meaningful data before the next major convergence point. The methodology above is scalable from small beginnings, but the longer measurement is deferred, the less lead time there is to act.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best way to measure change saturation?
The most robust approach combines three dimensions: change load (the volume of concurrent programmes affecting a group), change intensity (how disruptive each programme is across process, system, role, and behavioural dimensions), and absorption capacity (the group’s current ability to take on change). Combining these into a saturation risk score, tracked over time, provides a meaningful basis for governance and intervention decisions.
How do you know when an organisation has reached change saturation?
Saturation is typically confirmed by a combination of leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators include declining readiness scores across multiple programmes for the same groups, rising support ticket volumes, and falling participation in change activities. Lagging indicators include below-target adoption rates, benefits realisation shortfalls, and voluntary attrition spikes in high-change groups. When multiple signals align, saturation is almost certainly a factor.
What data do you need to measure change saturation?
The minimum data set includes: the change portfolio (all active programmes and their timelines), impact assessment data (which groups are affected, how significantly), readiness and adoption metrics from each programme, and capacity indicators for the highest-risk groups. Ideally this data is maintained in a centralised platform rather than distributed across programme-level documents.
Can change saturation be measured at the team level?
Yes, and team-level measurement is often the most actionable. While portfolio-level heat maps identify which business units or functions are carrying the highest load, team-level analysis identifies where the risk is most acute and allows targeted support to be directed precisely. Line manager input is essential for accurate capacity assessment at the team level.
How often should change saturation be measured?
At a minimum, quarterly. For organisations running fast-moving transformation portfolios, monthly or rolling measurement is more appropriate. The goal is to have enough lead time to act on risk signals before they translate into adoption failure. A retrospective saturation assessment after go-live confirms what happened but does not allow intervention.
