The 5 key steps to building an effective and efficient change management team

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“This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world, because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.”

Bill Gates

The rate of change in business and government is increasing more quickly than ever before, driven by competition, globalisation, and technology.

Changes come in many forms, including downsizing, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions, new sales processes, digital transformation, or new applications, like a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Organisations with the capability to effectively plan and manage change will be more responsive, will increase profits, and will suffer fewer of the negative impacts of change.

In recent times, many organisations have invested large sums of money in hiring change practitioners to build their change management capability. Yet these team are often poorly organised, inefficient and don’t function as a cohesive team. Organisations can act as though simply hiring change practitioners will fix the issues or problems. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

This white paper explores the five key steps to building the effectiveness and efficiency of your change management team.

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The 5 key steps to building an effective and efficient change management team

Five key steps for building your change management team are essential to achieving more and realising the benefits of change in your organisation.

Step 1 – PurposeTeams that achieve greatness have a vision and a mission to provide a sense of purpose. Think about the most successful sporting team: they have a clear understanding of their vision of success and mission. What is the vision and mission of your change management team?

Step 2 – SponsorshipWho sponsors change management and the change management team in your organisation? A senior leader has to champion change and ensure resources are allocated to build the change management team.

Step 3 – ScopeChange management teams face ever-increasing demand to provide support to their organisation. High-performing change management teams have a clearly defined scope and responsibilities that enable them to provide effective support for their organisation.

Step 4 – PlanningSporting teams plan how to improve their performance. Improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your change management team requires a plan to achieve the desired outcomes. What is your plan?

Step 5 – ReportingWhile change management has improved over the last 40 years, change management reporting has not. Reporting on the organisation’s change management efforts is important to monitor change progress. It also raises the visibility of the change management team.

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Step 1 – PurposeTeams that achieve greatness have a vision and a mission to provide a sense of purpose. Think about the most successful sporting team: they have clear understanding of their vision of success and mission. What is the vision and mission of your change management team?

A team with a clear purpose will achieve so much more than a team with no purpose.

VisionChange practitioners are very good at working with business to define the “future state” or the outcomes of the project. However, I often see change teams failing to apply some of this thinking to their own team. The vision is one sentence that clearly articulates the change management team’s vision for the future.

MissionWhat is the mission of your team? What is your team’s goal? The Mission will clearly articulate the one big goal that you are setting out to achieve in the in the next 5 – 10 years. Clearly articulating the Vision along with the Mission will give your change management team a clear sense of purpose.

ValuesWhat does your change management team value? What behaviours are important to you and your team? These may align to the organisation’s values or these may be additional. Values are not aspirational – they are attributes which are already present in your team.

Getting the team’s input or working with your change management team to develop the team’s purpose is a great way to engage them and develop a shared sense of purpose.

The Value of TimeTo drive successful change, a change management team needs to have a vision, to know its values and to have a well-defined mission.

One technology company had a clear vision, set for them by the company’s leadership. The vision alone, however, wasn’t enough. As a change management expert, I came in to help the team find its direction by defining its values and mission through a series of workshops.

The workshopping process had three major benefits:

1. Engagement – every member of the team participated in the process and shared their ideas.

2. Buy-in – everyone had a stake in the outcomes, which represented the ideas of the whole team, not just one or two team members.

3. Focus – the process resulted in well-defined statements of the team’s vision, mission and values, which in turn gave them clear direction and focus for their efforts.

One of the key factors emerged from the team’s shared value of ‘timeliness’, which led to a focus on ensuring activities were delivered at the right time and within reasonable timeframes, using both the Agile and Waterfall methodologies as required.

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Step 2 – SponsorshipWho sponsors change management and the change management team in your organisation? A senior leader has to champion change and ensure resources are allocated to build the change management team.

Who sponsors change management and the change management team in your organisation? A senior leader has to champion change and ensure resources are allocated to build the change management team.

1. Who owns change management?Often when building the change management capability of an organisation, there is no natural home for it. One must consider where change management capability best sits within the organisation. Change management is often located in HR or the IT department, and on occasion is part of the CEO’s office. Where will the change management capability be the most effective in your organisation? There is no single correct answer. However, the location of the change management capability efforts will often guide who should sponsor building the change management team and capability.

2. A senior sponsorThe sponsor will ensure that change management is championed at senior levels within the organisation. To ensure successful outcomes, the sponsor must be senior enough to influence senior leaders and ensure the appropriate allocation of resources to deliver the required outcomes.

3. The business case for change managementA business case is vital before the steps for building your change management team can be put in place. The business should follow the structure and format of any other business case within the organisation. It should set the business context and outline the business drivers for building the organisation’s change management team, and document the desired future state and business outcomes. The business case should clearly articulate the required financial and personnel investment to build the change management team within the organisation. Ultimately, the business case must make a strong case for investment. What are the expected business outcomes and how will they benefit the organisation? Unless these questions can be answered, it will be hard to ask senior leaders to invest in change management.

“A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.”

John C Maxwell

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The importance of being sponsoredWithout an influential sponsor to champion their efforts, there is no guarantee of success for a change management team, no matter how knowledgeable.

One organisation needed to change and adapt to significant upheaval in its industry or risk becoming redundant in its field. Unfortunately, while the company’s change practitioners understood the process of change management, the company leadership did not. As a result, the team had no senior business person to sponsor their program of change.

Without a senior sponsor to champion the necessary change program to keep the company competitive, the change management team struggled to succeed. Major projects lacked the change resources to be truly effective, and the change management team as a whole had no clear plan. This resulted in a lack of direction and senior buy-in.

Ralleo’s experience shows that organisations with a clear, senior change management sponsor are far more likely to achieve their change management goals and thrive.

Step 3 – ScopeChange management teams face ever-increasing demand to provide support to their organisation. High- performing change management teams have a clearly defined scope and responsibilities that enable them to provide effective support for their organisation.

The reality is that every change management team will have limited resources and budget and unlimited requests for assistance by the organisation. Defining the scope and responsibilities of the change team and educating the organisation will greatly assist the change management team to focus on what is important.

ScopeThe scope of the change management team must be defined. Making the change management team responsible for every change is unrealistic. Defining the scope provides clarity on what needs to be delivered. Scope may be defined by the strategic priorities of the organisation, the size or complexity of the changes, or the change projects approved by the project management office.

Team ResponsibilitiesOnce we define what is in scope and what is out of scope of the change management team, the next step is to define what the team is responsible for. What type of services or support does the team provide to the changes that are in scope? Does the team provide change practitioners to do delivery work or does it act more as an internal consulting team, providing guidance and coaching to the organisation?

EducationIt is great the change management team know what they are doing – but what about the organisation? Change management is still poorly understood in most organisations. Everyone knows what the accounting team does, but what is change management and what does your high-performance change management team do? Educating your leaders, key stakeholders, and your organisation on why, how and what your change management team does will greatly assist in building the team’s effectiveness.

“Great Vision Without Great People Is Irrelevant.”

Jim Collins

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Express yourselfKnowledge is important, but being able to clearly express why the change management team exists and the value it brings is vital to ensuring success. This is especially true of very large organisations, where the messages can be more easily lost in the sheer volume of daily operations.

When working with a large, multinational oil and gas company, I helped the change management team to establish a very clear scope and range of defined activities. The team was enabled to more easily articulate its purpose and their services.

This clarity meant the team essentially operated as an internal change management consultancy and could educate the business on their role as change practitioners.

In turn, the company, from senior leadership through to team leaders, understood the team’s role, the value they provided to the company and how the change management team could assist them in adapting to and embracing the changes necessary for success.

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Step 4 – PlanningSporting teams plan how to improve their performance. Enhancing and improving the efficiency of your change management team requires a plan to achieve the desired outcomes. It is important you create a plan linked to your mission and follow the plan to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your change management team. What’s your plan?

Your plan will contain several key elements that you would also see in a business plan. Key topics include goals or targets, change management processes, tools to plan and manage change, activities to build the capability of people, resourcing, and a budget.

The plan to improve your change management team will require project management and change management activities to achieve the desired the goals or targets. It is important that you manage the changes and improvements within your team effectively. Often this is overlooked – and a change management team can be the most resistant to change.

Once the plan has been created and approved by the change management sponsor, it is important to track and report on progress. This can be a challenge as often the team is delivering change for the organisation and the team’s own plan is given a lower priority. This is a trap, and can reduce the effectiveness and efficiency of the team. By planning and implementing a plan for the change management team, change managers have reported that the efficiencies gained far outweigh the time spent on planning.

Leading organisations are using Ralleo to improve the planning and management of change. Investment in Ralleo optimises the change management team, enabling the team to deliver more to their organisation.

“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”

Seneca

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Step 5 – ReportingWhile change management has improved over the last 40 years, change management reporting has not. Reporting on the organisation’s change management efforts is important to monitor change progress. It also raises the visibility of the change management team.

Reporting is an important but often neglected part of building the change management team and capability within an organisation. What is reported on a regular basis is valued more than what is not reported. Financial reporting is a great example of how regular reporting is used to monitor and manage the financial performance of the organisation.

There are 3 important reasons why reporting on change management activities is critical to success:

1. Reporting validates change management HR, Accounting, and Sales all have regular reporting – why not change management. If we don’t measure something, it creates the perception that we don’t value it. How many changes is your team managing? What is the health status of each change? How are the resources of the change team being utilised?

2. Reporting increases awareness Reporting the changes happening across the organisation on a regular basis will increase the awareness of change and how it is being managed. Leading organisations are using digital change management solutions to plan, manage and report on change across the organisation. Digital solutions like Ralleo make reporting easier, faster, and more professional. Regular reporting greatly assists to raise the awareness of change management in an organisation.

3. Reporting allows better communication Reporting on the change management team’s progress against the plan will allow the team and the sponsor to monitor and communicate progress to senior leaders and the rest of the organisation. It will also provide an opportunity to celebrate the small but important wins along the way, as well as the achievement of milestones. Celebrating success is an important part of embedding the changes to ways of working.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Peter Drucker

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Seeing the big pictureHow do you know whether the changes you are implementing are effective? How can you track whether these changes are improving processes and outcomes as planned?

A large utility company with 35 “Category One” transformation projects was finding it difficult to track them. Using shared Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on a share point sight was proving time consuming and cumbersome to update.

The change team decided to implement Ralleo to provide a more effective overview of the process. Immediately, the team noticed several benefits.

The first was that the change practitioners no longer had to update several separate spreadsheets, which made reporting much easier.

The second was that Ralleo provided different ways of viewing the data. As a result, the team gained insights into the data they hadn’t previously seen.

Thirdly, the change management team and change leaders were now able to use Ralleo’s unique dashboard and views to communicate their work and its outcomes more effectively. At the same time, this raised the profile of their work throughout the organisation.

Good reporting is vital to tracking and measuring the effectiveness of your organisation’s managed changes. More than that, it’s vital to demonstrating the value of change to an organisation by showing how change is leading it towards its planned future.

Next stepsThe essential point is that every organisation can improve and move ahead of competitors by improving the way it responds and manages change at every level.

High-performing change management teams have a key role to play in supporting organisations to manage change effectively and efficiently. Organisations that fail to build an effective change management team will fall behind competitors who are embracing change and using it to a competitive advantage.

To discuss further how Ralleo can help build the effectiveness and efficiency of your change management team, call the Ralleo team today on +61 1300 857 615.

About the author

Joe Hutton is the CEO of Ralleo.

Joe Hutton is the CEO of Ralleo. Ralleo is a digital change management solution for planning and managing digital transformations and organisational change.

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