Six Steps to Prioritize and Optimize Business Change Success

In a recent McKinsey article titled 'Secrets of Successful Change Implementation' (October, 2017), it was shown that organizations that had the ability to focus their organization on prioritized set of changes had more successful change efforts compared to those who did not.

If your organization is implementing too many changes how do you influence the organization to focus on a prioritized set of changes and therefore be more effective in landing changes successfully?

1. Use Data - To back up your hypothesis that there are too many changes impacting the business you need to substantiate this using data. You can do this by mapping out the change impact software of every key initiative impacting the business, identifying which part of the business it impacts, the period of time, and the severity of the impact.


2. Develop Heat Map - One way to do this visually is to develop a heat map of the business impact across all initiatives. Tallied initiative impact levels then determine the level of 'heat'. This provides a simple and easy to understand depiction of any risk in having too much change. The Change Compass tool provides an agile, digital way of formulating the change management heat map.


3. Target Operations Management - After you have your data on what the picture of change impact looks like, talk to your Operations Management stakeholders about this. Operations Managers are tasked with managing capacity and ensuring there is effective 'hands on deck'. They are also tasked with ensuring that changes land effectively. Therefore, they have a vested interest in understanding how much change is coming up and when might be 'too much'.


4. Tell the story to the PMO - The project management office is also vested in understanding how different projects may impact the business and the resulting associated risks. Sharing the story with the PMO is an important step since they are tasked with working with senior managers to prioritize changes.


5. Raise the agenda to senior managers - senior executives are decision makers on initiative priority so it may make sense to work directly with senior stakeholders.


6. Facilitate cross-functional discussions - Change impacts on the organizations can result in a range of cross-functional impacts. Facilitating sessions across functions including Customer Experience, Operations, Projects, Portfolio change management, Human Resources, etc. can help to raise the awareness and profile of the agenda. Through this, it may be easier to reach agreement around how to prioritize and focus change implementation efforts.

The Change Compass helps companies undergoing multiple changes to create one integrated view of change impacts. With this, companies can make real time, fact-based decisions to maximize the success of change initiatives. Operations managers can better manage change capacity. Project Managers can better sequence impacts on the business. Senior managers can better manage impacts on customers, and the likelihood of achieving initiative benefits.

Importance of Portfolio Change Management

Managing a significant number of change initiatives can be a complex and challenging feat for organizations. Within this complexity, effective access to data to make decisions is critical. However, there are change management tools to aid decision making. In particular, change impact analysis tools are essential as they help to organize and make visual a large number of change initiatives and the effect of these on employee performance and customer experience.

A useful change impact analysis tool should provide the following:

• A simple way of capturing the essence of the change impact on the employee and the customer
• A way of quantifying the impact which may then be utilized for reporting and decision making purposes
• A way of making sense what the totality of the impact is. And be able to determine whether there is too much change or not
• Ability to allow the user to drill down and understand how impacts are affecting employees and customers, starting broad and be able to narrow down to the view for specific parts of the organization

Creating one integrated view of initiatives is critical to enable decision makers to visualize the change impacts across the organization. It also enables different initiative owners to look at the same data and subsequently work together so as not to adverse impact the business at the same period of time. One view of change allows companies to prioritize sequence and better plan for the change roadmap in a way that is integrated and synergized.

Effective portfolio management is a way of organizing and managing multiple initiatives. Portfolio Managers can benefit from one view of change since it allows them to leverage change management data and be able to plan effectively. Typically, portfolio managers will take into account cost, project progress and business impact information to make an informed decision on the overall implementation of initiatives.

Change Impact Analysis Tools can be used by portfolio managers to look into particular 'change contention' periods and through data analytics understand to what extent initiatives should proceed or not. To do this, portfolio managers need to work closely with the business to understand historical occurrences where there was too much change and be able to relate this to forecasted change impact levels.

The Change Compass is a company that provides an easy to use digital offering supported by online tutorials and user guides. Organizations can easily customize the tool according to their needs but still leverage a proven methodology of defining, quantifying and visualizing change impacts on employees and customers. Several large corporations have already benefitted from this digital tool to better make decisions and improve business performance.