10 Key Competencies for Change Managers

Although change management is founded on established theories, in too many cases initiatives fail to produce intended outcomes, and go over time and over budget. One study by Gartner Research, for example, found that of the companies surveyed 90% had experienced significant change within the past two years, but only 5% had avoided substantial disruptions and finished on time. Why do problems like these exist? Is there something wrong with change management theory? Or does the problem lie with how people perform?

In this article we examine 10 key competencies for change managers.

1. They must have proven research ability: Change management is a form of problem-solving. The best solutions to the problems are not discovered by guesswork, hunches, a ‘sixth sense’, or past experience. The stakes are far too high to trust unreliable processes. Problem analysis and solutions must be based on scientific evidence, and that means change management must be seen as a social science research exercise. Managers don’t need rigid ‘maps’ of how they work or get overly excited about the tools they have at their disposal. What they really need is a sound knowledge of how to conduct excellent research in social sciences. They need to know how to design research projects to collect sufficient, valid and reliable data; how to analyse data; how to report findings; and how to use the findings to create practical and workable solutions.

2. They must have a clear understanding of the change process: Nobody is going to do a good job if they don’t know what change is, how it works, and the theory and principles of how to manage it. Their understanding must be based on well-established research. It cannot be based on what the person ‘thinks’ change is, or on past personal experience. Change management is on shaky ground without a thorough understanding of the change process and established management principles.

3. They must be able to overcome resistance to change: It is a well-known and often lamented reality that people in organizations resist change. They do so for all kinds of reasons – and the manager must be aware of what those reasons are and how to overcome them. Failure to manage resistance sees most change initiatives ultimately fail in a slow war of attrition.

4. They must be able to identify and work with key change agents: Key change agents are people who are ready for change, and people of influence. People with readiness are unlikely to resist the change (providing it is introduced well) however, they are likely to spread positive stories about it. Those are the kind of stories you want.

5. Change managers must be able to harness the power of narratives: Stories create extremely powerful forces that can make or break change. Change managers must be able to tap into those forces and shape the kinds of stories people are telling within the organization.

6. They must be able to address cultural issues: Organizational culture is a broad concept that includes elements such as belief systems, attitudes, use of language, expectations, management styles, etc. These cultural elements must be examined to see if they are contributing to resistance, or contributing to change. The manager must know how to assess them and how to influence them, as required.

7. They must ensure organizational processes and structures support change: The processes and structures within the organization must support change for it to be successful, and it is essential the manager is aware of how these processes and structures impact the change process.

8. They must be able to use the power of organizational networks: Organizations are networked structures. Certain people are influential, and certain people have power. Change managers need to be skilled at working with different types of people. They need to be able to influence powerful and influential people so they become engaged with the change and contribute positively to the process.

9. They must have commitment for the change: Change can be tedious and exacting – most complex problem-solving exercises are. The manager must be dedicated to continually solve problems as they arise, to change tactics, and to see the process through to completion.

10. They must have realistic expectations: Change managers must be realistic about how difficult the process might be, and how long it might take. They also need to be realistic about how staff might react, and what their challenges could be.

The role of change manager is a complex and demanding one that requires a specialised skillset and extensive knowledge. The list of competencies listed here is by no means exhaustive. If the manager is not up to the task change can become very expensive, very disruptive, and potentially toxic to the organization. Even if you have skilled and experienced internal change managers, there are advantages to securing help from outside. External change managers provide an objective view and not caught up in organizational politics.

Steve Barlow

Change Management Will Change Your Life

All of us have been part of an effort that, for some reason, did not turn out as we intended. It could have been something as simple as that new omelet recipe you wanted to try. Why didn’t your omelet look the same as that pretty picture on recipes.com? Or it could have been the 2013 rollout of healthcare.gov, the beleaguered web portal of the Obamacare initiative.

Somewhere along the way, something went wrong with that omelet and with Obamacare’s website. Identifying what went wrong (and quickly) is a big part of what change management is all about.

What is Change Management?

Whether the goal is to make an omelet or to roll out healthcare.gov, it is important to realize that these products came into existence only after the completion of many individual steps. In the case of the omelet, you beat the eggs, warmed the butter, diced the fillings and so forth. Your future omelet will eventually come from this soup of ingredients.

This soup of ingredients undergoes major and minor changes as you progress through the recipe. The current state of your omelet can be called your “as-is state.” From this as-is state, you make a series of observations and form the “baseline” mental image of your omelet. As you move ahead to the next step in your recipe, you remember this baseline and monitor what the next change does to your effort. You can likely identify a problem faster if you pay attention to what things looked like before.

A lot of change management is simply empirical observation. With a good record of changes and whether the result was positive or negative, the bad outcomes can often be minimized and the good outcomes made more frequent.

Advantages of Change Management

In practice, change management has great practical value to the enterprise. Many organizations are subject to regulatory agencies or laws. For example, U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

One technical provision of HIPAA is that healthcare providers must safeguard against unauthorized changes to a health record. In this scenario, change management is not simply a benefit but a requirement. For example, if a patient has a documented history of an allergy to penicillin and his record is erroneously updated to report no allergies present, monitoring may help catch an otherwise deadly mistake.

For undertakings that involve many steps or many changes, change management can offer a clear reversion path. The record of change is the “trail of bread crumbs” that gets your product back to a functional state. Let’s say that you are working on an Excel spreadsheet with many embedded formulas, each of which references a specific location in the spreadsheet.

If you start introducing a lot of changes all at once – moving around columns and updating formulas in the spreadsheet – you may find that some of your formulas no longer work. But which change broke your spreadsheet? If you can’t identify the change(s) that did, you may have to redo all of that work.

Another advantage is that it helps preserve institutional knowledge. In large programming projects, for example, the product manager can review the state of the application over time. Each code change or revision is typically checked in to a repository as a sort of archive. The entire evolution of the application project can be observed by looking at these snapshots in time of the code. As a result one can begin to understand the way the product has changed over time – even if the original programmers have long since left the company.

Challenges of Change Management

Change management is often unpopular due to the increased overhead it brings. In fact, if done poorly, it can bog down the output of the entire organization.

There is a cost associated with change management. That cost can come from the time it takes to train staff to use the new process. There can also be capital expenditures if the company decides to purchase a CM software application.

Perhaps the most serious challenge to consider for change management is the overhead it may bring. If the process of change management is more onerous than making the change itself, the CM process may need improvement. If change management is not handled in an efficient manner, the new process may not gain acceptance and consistent use. Worse, the rank-and-file staff may quietly lower their output to the business as a way to avoid using the change management process.

Recommendations for Change Management

Before rolling out a new process or buying new software, the business should identify key stakeholders for the effort of rolling out change management. A project sponsor should be identified that will act as the owner of the project. Together, the stakeholders and project sponsor should identify what needs the project must fulfill to be considered successful. Desirable features can also be included alongside project requirements.

Once the project team is identified and the goals listed, the team should examine what resources should be involved in determining the necessary steps to accomplish those goals. Many goals in the project will likely reveal an interdependency between two groups within the business: for example, the rank-and-file’s acceptance of the change management systems, and the executives’ ability to provide an efficient and functionally relevant system.

Failure to meet such an interdependency can risk project failure. Therefore, it is important that the project team hold conversations with staff outside the project team to determine what an efficient and functionally relevant change management system might look like. This can mean lots of conversations and interactions with entities across the business.

If requirements, interdependencies, and functional concerns are addressed prior to rollout, the business will have an accurate idea of what their change management system will need to be successful.

5 Change Management Challenges In Turbulent Times

Over the last few years, with the dramatic changes in the financial world and the ever speeding of worldwide communications, change management has become an art form all the more challenging.

New business environments are facing change like never before and because of this accelerated pace, change management faces some new challenges as a process in itself.

Here are five specific to the ‘new world’, where the only thing that stays steady is the rate of change of the pace of change:

1. Keeping Their Trust

With each change in the workplace following hot on the heels of the last change, it is unsurprising that employees are feeling punch drunk as each blow hits home. ‘This place isn’t like what it once was’, will be the plaintiff cry heard in workplaces across the world.

Historically change happened gradually – if at all – and even just a few short years ago, any change was greeted as an event; a novelty and the inherent values of an organisation still showed through.

Not any more. And those leading change have to work far, far harder to ensure that they are seen to be the trusted organisation they always were.

For managers implementing change, the position they are in (commonly known as between ‘a rock and a hard place’) has meant that they have had to deliver change to their people, whilst also ensuring that they personally retained good relationships with their people, often built up over many years.

The solution to this is that investment in the trusting relationships they build over time will go along way to insulate them from the bad feeling that comes when changes are implemented, however often they happen. The key action for managers to take, is to spend as much time as possible of the office and with their people, listening to them and valuing them, as early as they can, so that the strong trust is in place before you need it.

2. Being Fully Honest

When changes are being made, managers will find there is a conflict between being open and honest with their people. This can cause a challenge because as they have been able to build trusting relationships, openness and honesty have been one of the foundations.

For a manager suddenly to become much more careful about what they say, can lead to suspicion and short-term reduction in the trust their people have in them.

The way to resolve this is two-fold. By building a series of relationships with employees that, over time has been tested and shown to be robustly trustworthy, a manager will be able to use that to help when they can’t be quite as open as they might be in different times.

The second issue is to be open and honest about what they can and cannot be open about! This statement of reality will show their employees that they really are sticking with the principles already embedded in the relationship – that of honesty and openness in the communication between them.

3. Creating a ‘Constant Change’ Environment

How would it be if there were no surprises and changes came and went with excitement and fun? That takes control back and makes people feel better too. This requires a change in mindset to encourage – even proactively stimulate – change in lives and in business too.

Where change is challenging is where we simply don’t have the skill to appreciate what opportunities change creates.

By looking for change constantly, managers – and, very importantly, their teams – set the ladder against a different wall and when change still gets applied outside their control, they are far more able to see the possibilities – and less likely to dwell on any downsides.

4. Maintaining Morale

In a change ridden world, people feel battered by the effects and this can strike at the very heart of how they are feeling. In any business, it leaves a sense of uncontrolled ‘done to’ rather than being a part. By getting people engaged with change and having an integral say in the ‘how’ of the ‘what’ needs to be done, creativity and engagement flows.

The best managers see their employees as a resource in change situations – even more in this new age where past conventions of ‘;caring for our people’, are being thrown out of the door.

For many employees, this is such a shift in what they are used to that they fail to see the way forward – so letting them be a fully signed-up part of that way is a perfect tactic to maintain and even max out their morale and motivation.

The question is, as a manager, will you be prepared to get out of your own way and let that happen?

5. Bringing Good People In

Incredibly, changing workplaces generate new opportunities for managers, not least in the arena of recruitment. It’s a little sad to say so, but in many situations, managers have been left with a less than fully-formed team.

So when changes to personnel happen, it’s critical that this clear-out is used as an opportunity to bring in the right people next time. For this, many managers will have to shape up in their recruitment skills or they will simply replace like-with-like and make no progress. Indeed, because of the churn time it takes for people to settle in, there could be a significant decrease in performance over a protracted period.

Recruit effectively from the burgeoning pool out there. Review where it didn’t work out in the past and grab this opportunity for change, to build a sharper, more dynamic – more demanding of you even – team for the future.

Change provides opportunity, if you let it happen. And it’s more than that. Finding the courage and strength to be dynamic and creative in turbulent business times can shape careers – in both ways. Effective managers have the capacity to stand back and change themselves too.

And this is for the benefit of all.

© 2013 Martin Haworth is a business and management coach and trainer, working

Change Management Elements

The 3 Elements of Change Management

About Change Management
I’ve read books and articles over the years to try and help me improve my management techniques around all aspects of project work, especially Change Management. There are some very good articles on Change Management around from some very experienced Project Managers. There are also some very good industry standard methodologies which will attempt to guide you through the ins and outs of Change Management, amongst other things, and they are also very good.

Will any of these articles, books or training courses remove the challenges of Change Management – I don’t think so. Remember this always “Projects are about People” and then you’ll always be sure to blame the right aspect of project management on it’s core failing – it’s always the people that catch you out.

Lets briefly look at the three core elements of Change management then, that make this a special sort of headache for all project managers. In doing so lets first distinguish between change brought on by the nature of the project and change within the project. We’re interested here in Change within the Project – which is Project Change Management. More about the reasons we make change and use project management to deliver that change in another article.

The 3 Elements of Change Management:

1. Causes and Drivers of Change
2. Impact of change and getting agreement
3. Implementing change in the project (or program)

Well that wasn’t too painful was it? If only life was this simple. If you take these basic elements and build a simple process around them you’ll get a reasonably workable process flow which identifies basic causes of change, such as;

Change Management of Planned Changes – for example;

agreed upgrade in a solution as part of a strategic program who’s conclusion was announced after the project started.
value engineering where the project has an opportunity to embrace a new approach to the advantage of the whole project, to reduce costs etc..
unplanned business growth requiring an expansion (or contraction) of the final solution.
Change Management of Unsolicited or Unplanned Changes;

Client decides part way through delivering a project that they don’t have enough meeting rooms and require a re-design of floor space to accommodate more.

Increase in scope of the conference facilities after they have been built, to include new/additional technologies.

change in senior management who decides he wants the floor plan changed to meet his “new needs”

- my favorite – a complete re-stack (re-shuffle of trading teams) of a trading floor because the wall of screens from one team block the main view out of the building, a week before go-live.
Change Management of Emergency Changes;

Fixes to critical components as a result of damage caused through some uncontrolled event – accidental flooding or collapse of some critical infrastructure.

Changes to critical components brought on by poor planning and failure to predict accurate requirements. You got caught out! – yes it happens.

Impact of dwindling resources (budget) forcing the need to adjust the solution quality or schedule etc.
There are other elements to Change Management – at a higher level it’s the communications before, during and after projects. Within the project it’s about managing expectations and being able to predict or foresee the impact of a required outcome, and “coax” your customer along the right path to retain their support and the momentum in delivery.

Change Management is an essential Control component of any project. You will need the following ingredients in place to make change work;

1. An agreed and signed-off scope of work clearly defining the deliverables and constraints
2. An agreed (and proven) change process which will take a change input (request) and provide:

Complete description of the change
What’s driving the change
Impact on schedule, cost and quality (final deliverables)
Who raised the change request
Who approved it
When it will happen
Who will action it
If change is denied, then a sign-off to that intent.
3. A communications forum where Changes are regularly reviewed and all impacted parties are present for comment.

4. An appointed Project Board or Steering Committee where there is the authority to approve changes that impact the project beyond the authority of the project manager or project team to decide on.

Remember – Change Management is all about people. You need to identify the change and it’s impact and then get the right people to agree to approve or decline the change request based on facts and credible experience (sometimes).

This sounds easy but on small projects people can get very protective of their “perceived control” or authority and the project manager may become hamstrung to make basic decisions or to manage the sometimes unreasonable requests for changes from customers staff. On large projects Change Management can and often does become a full time job with a dedicated team doing nothing else but review Change Requests and facilitate the right communications forums and approval meetings.

Basic Change Management Process flow
Process ->
Recognize Change request ->
Document it ->
Review it ->
Analyze Impact ->
Present to Change board->

If approved, re-plan program to include.

If denied, close it and get on with life.

Of course, this is just one view of Change Management based on 30 years of delivery experience. Each Project Manager will have there own view but I doubt that any experienced Project Manager will argue with the above but would embellish it with there own invaluable experience to put more “meat on the bone”.

If you would like to read more on Project Management and some of the Challenges Project Managers face, please go to IT Project Management Singapore [http://www.itprojectmanagementsingapore.com/] for more great information. Here you will also find links to key resources and organisations that can provide first class Project Management services to any business, small or large, local or international. We have a range of professional services partners that have a great track record of services delivery across Asia.

If you’d like to read more articles on key Project Challenges or just learn

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