Change is hard but not impossible

Importance of Change Management

Planning a change is easy and implementing a change is simple, compared to changing people's minds to embrace it and motivating them to change their behavior. You may have sound reasons for making a change, and the authority to make the decision, but if you ignore the people impacted you will probably fail. Those people and their support, are the keys to your success.

We focus on what we are comfortable with

There are two components to a successful change, technical and relational. Fail at either one and you will not have a successful change. You might still get the change implemented, but it is going to be far from smooth.

We are a technological society, and most organizations are better at the technical aspects of a change than the relational. That shouldn't surprise anyone. But now, think about how we react when a project is having problems. What do we do? We usually dig into the technical aspects to see if we missed anything. It is our nature to focus on what we understand, and that often means making slight improvements to the parts of the change that weren't really hurting us anyway, while ignoring the parts that were derailing us.

The good news

The good news is that people generally want to help you succeed, they want the company to succeed and they really do want to do the best job they possibly can. They don’t want to change, but they want to do the right thing. If you can help them understand the change, the reasons for it and the value it will bring, you can turn them into supporters.

The change management process is one of identifying what information people need and how best to present it. Make sure they understand the need for the change and gain their support for the change rather than for the plan to make the change. Allow them a role in the formation of the plan whenever you can, and praise their efforts in making the change possible. This will help ensure the success of the change, which in turn is your success.

Components of a typical change management plan

• Change Vision – description of the desired change in the words of the people charged with implementing it. This needs to be very clear and concise. Everyone on the team may already think they know what the vision is, but they probably understand it differently.
• Impact Assessment
  • Organizational Analysis – what is the impact of the change on the organization? This is often the main driver for the project, and needs to be clearly understood, stated, and communicated.
  • Stakeholder Analysis – what does the change mean to the individual people and groups involved? This is often overlooked. Many projects have a stakeholder analysis, but it is often limited to a list of stakeholders and their relative support of the project. It should also ask question like ...
    • How does this person define success?
    • What does this person stand to gain if the we succeeds?
    • What does this person stand to lose if the we succeeds?
    • What we need from this person in order to succeed?
• Force Field Analysis – assessment of the forces (both enabling and restraining) acting on the change. Again, this is often done, but should be expanded. I usually have groups visualize a ball on a table with people blowing on it from both directions. Project success is symbolized by blowing the ball off one end of the table. The group can then identify the people who are blowing in each direction; these are the forces. The next step is to identify which of the forces you want to increase or decrease. List these and come up with a plan to increase or decrease each force as appropriate. The specifics will end up in the communication plan or action plan.
• Communication Plan – what information needs to be communicated, and how? Since most of change management is influencing people, most of the other tools feed into the communication plan. Here you formulate the plans for giving specific people and groups the information they need to make a decision to support you and your project.
• Action Plan – what are the tasks to be performed, and who will perform them? Here you can list specific tasks from the communication plan, along with other tasks that might have been identified. These tasks can finally be put into the project plan for execution and tracking.
• Plan Management – who will manage the overall change, updating the plan, keeping records, measuring progress, etc.