When Change Management roles were created
Major change in an organisation requires that individuals change. The visible measures that change has happened can be seen in people displaying new behaviours and adhering to new processes and ways of working. Predicting, understanding, planning and responding to the ways different people interpret and react to change is the core challenge (Newton, 2007). The practice of change management leverages the normal mechanisms within an organisation to influence and develop employees through broad activities such as training, communication and sponsorship, and through one-on-one activities such as coaching (Hiatt & Creasey, 2003).
Change management as a full-time or part-time responsibility
Many people in organisations have change management responsibilities as a part of their remit. For others, change management is a full-time role focussed on ensuring the organisation receives the business benefits associated with the future state – whatever that is.
In my book of Change Stories, I wrote a chapter on What a change manager does. It’s important to ask this question as the role varies depending on the scope and challenges of the project and the organisational culture.
Below are a few reflections on the activities of those in full time change management roles.
As a change manager, my role involves meeting with every single division, some of them every week. There are ongoing conversations and constantly being aware of what’s going on, really unpacking it, really reading people, drawing themes together, and understanding from a program perspective what could be impacting some of those responses or reactions. And then looking at what we can do next. Fiona
Building the change leadership skills of managers
We’re co-designing and facilitating a change leadership program for 42 managers as one of the ways we’re building enterprise change management capability. We need to support them and build their change leadership. We do self-assessments and coaching sessions to help embed the learning. We’ve set up a change champion network and we get insights from people at the front line. A big thing for us is our data and insights from our people and using these to inform our change approach, or able to elevate them to the right people. We very much position ourselves as coaches and enablers and facilitators, not doers. Being clear on roles and responsibilities is important here. Leanne
Readiness assessment, communication and training implementation
If organisations want to implement a new application, a new type of software, or change from the current way of working to a new way and using a different system, my role is to make sure that when it’s implemented, the people are ready to work with what’s being implemented without too much disruption. So I’ll communicate with them. I’ll work with the sponsors, I’ll do stakeholder engagement. I’ll look at process changes. I’ll look at organisational changes. I’ll help with the implementation of the training program. I’ll do business benefits management. And I’ll do business readiness, adoption and usage measurement. Neville
Strategic change, process reengineering and running the PMO
I’ve been involved in change management programs for the last 10 years and usually do strategic change. But my very first job also had IT and business process re-engineering. I’ve met other change managers who basically run project management offices [PMOs]. Ingrid
These comments highlight the diversity of change roles. If you work in change management it would be interesting to know what you spend most of your time doing.
References
Hiatt, J., & Creasey, T. J. (2003). Change management: The people side of change. Prosci.
Stanley, T (2020) Change Stores: Success and failure in changing organisations. Lightning Source