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In order to deliver your outcomes successfully, it is important that you have a clear plan in place outlining what you are trying to achieve and all the actions that need to be taken forward. The purpose of this page is to provide you with all the relevant resources to help you to put your plan together and ensure that all key areas are covered.
Step 1 – Get Clarity
The first step in effective change management is to have a really clear understanding of what is happening and what you’re seeking to accomplish.
Use the “3 thinking questions” to help you get clarity.
1 What are we trying to accomplish?
- Know exactly what you are trying to achieve
- What will the outcome look like
- What evidence do we have that change is required
2 What changes can we make that will result in that improvement?
- What needs to happen in order to deliver your outcome
3 How will we know the change has been an improvement?
- What will our success measures be
If you’re struggling to answer any of the above – are you really clear about what you’re trying to achieve? If you’re not you’ll need to go back to whoever is sponsoring the change to get clarity.
Knowing why change needs to happen helps you be clearer on the actions you need to take in order to deliver your outcome and to prepare yourself for any potential factors that may hinder progress. Below are some useful tools to help you plan change thoroughly.
- Force Field Analysis – helps you weigh the forces for and against delivering a particular change to allow you to assess how to increase positive forces and minimise the negatives
- 5 Whys of Analysis– enables you to get a deeper understanding of the root causes of issues
- SWOT– helps identify all the different internal and external factors which could help or hinder your plans
- PESTLE– helps you scan the environment beyond the organisation to identify the driving forces for change
- Project Management Toolkit – supports you with the delivery of your project using the Aberdeen City Council process
Step 2 – Who Will be Impacted and Who Needs to be Involved
Once you have established what you are looking to achieve and what needs to happen to deliver this, it is important that you identify who will be affected by the change and who you need to get on board in order to implement change effectively.
Below are a list of tools which help you assess this who needs to be involved and their level of involvement
- Stakeholder Analysis – identifies your key stakeholders and what their needs are depending on their level of influence and interest in what you’re trying to accomplish
- RASCI – clarifies the role and responsibilities of people who are involved
- Ladder of Engagement – helps determine the different levels at which you would engage with different stakeholders
Step 3 – Communication is Key
Everybody receives and processes information in different ways. As a result, it is important to consider how you put your messages across to ensure that all essential areas are covered.
Below are some useful tools to help you to frame your communication and get your messages across effectively.
- McCarthy Model of Communication – Quick Guide – provides you with a structure to frame your communication so that it is complete.
- Prosci – a communication checklist which outlines best practice when communicating change in an organisation.
Step 4 – Implementing Change
In terms of choosing how you are going to implement the change, this would largely depend on whether it is a planned or an emergent change. Regardless of which method you choose to select, there are benefits and drawbacks associated with each. Below outlines options for how change might be implemented.
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Step 5 – Monitor Progress
Change does not always have a final point where you go from A to B. In some cases it is continuously happening therefore if we want to deliver continuous improvement, we need to constantly assess where we are in order to make a decision on what our next steps are. We hold a lot of data about the city as an organisation. If you have gathered some baseline data at the planning stage, it is useful to evaluate these against your success measures to see whether you have made an improvement.
If you do have key milestones or a delivery end date for a particular project then a Post Implementation Review is a useful to allow you to assess whether you have delivered your project outcomes and the intervention that you have put in place has made an improvement. It will also help you to learn what worked particularly well and what could have been better going forwards.
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