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.