The Problem With Change Management Metrics

As change practitioners we often hear that Change is intangible and hard to measure – A key concern with change management metrics. As a result, the discipline is often perceived as less value-adding and less critical to the business and program performance. We work with technical, finance, process, and operations specialists who often donât get what we are on about.

A typical scenario that Change practitioners often complain about is that they are in a typical project meeting where everyone is consumed with technical defects, testing data, project cst and delivery resource requirements. From an analytics and reporting perspective, I often hear how hard it is to highlight and position the importance of Change data. But, as a part of Change delivery we do produce various data to track progress. Why are we still not able to be at the centre of the table?

The problem is that most of the data we produce is data that is not positioned to link strongly to ultimate business outcomes. For example:

Employee Feedback

Employee opinions are useful and insightful, however this often reflects what stakeholders already suspect.

Change Readiness Surveys

Again, potentially useful and insightful. But, is agreeing to the statements in the survey equivalent of actual behavior change? (i.e. knowing vs doing) Does positive survey results guarantee business impact and full benefits realized.

Training Completion Rates

Training completion rates may be a minimum requirement to ensure the knowledge transfer has happened. However, will the behavior change? What is the impact on the operations?

What we need is to focus on the critical business outcomes and be able to demonstrate how change data provides leading indicators to 1) the likelihood of realizing initiative benefits, and 2) impact on the business.

For example, if an organization is focused on improving customer experience, then we need to demonstrate how initiatives could impact their experience. Firstly, we need to work out to what extent the customer cares about the effects of the initiative, the magnitude of the impacts on customers and whether the impacts are positive or negative (from the perspective of the customer). The following diagram is an illustration of how the experiences of a particular customer segment are forecasted to change with the various roll out impacts of initiatves (using the Change Compass tool).

In this way, we have demonstrated the importance of managing change impact analysis over the timeline since any increase or decrease in customer experience could equate to hundreds of millions of dollars (according to Forrester research). Suddenly, we are now talking about top-line revenue impacts that will put us in the centre of attention. What has been your experience in linking change data to business results?

For more information about change management metrics visit the website https://www.thechangecompass.com/.

7 Change Portfolio Management Best Practices

Managing a set of change initiatives through a portfolio management approach is relatively new for some organizations. This approach is drawn from the portfolio project management approach by dividing a set of initiatives into different groups. This then becomes more manageable from a workload perspective.

Portfolio project managers are focused on investment funding, program management, governance, project execution and resource management. For portfolio change mangers, 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 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 in 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 effective portfolio management? 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 get’s 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 and 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. 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 Impacts 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 at 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 head count 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 view to identify 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 progress of the change.

A standard meeting agenda for change governance would include the following:

• Review the previous month’s changes including call outs 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 there are concurrent changes 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. 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

Portfolio project management manage the slate of projects using a structured process of funding, prioritization, analysis and review based on data. In a similar vein, so should change portfolio managers. 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. The challenge is how to collect, analyze, present and leverage the power of these data.

The Change Compass is a digital tool that quantifies and packages change impacts into data that can be easily analyzed and presented in a visual format to decision makers. Initiative owners who own the source of the information update change impact data. Up to date change impact data can be accessed at any time with reporting generated automatically. The portfolio change manager is able to 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 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 roll out.

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, organisational 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 approach as well as learning approach can be tested in these groups.

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.