Getting it Right:
Critical Success Factors for Change Management Initiatives, Part 2
As a follow-up to last week’s blog this week’s entry focuses on the five additional
Critical Success Factors (CSF) that a successful Change Management (CM) program
needs. To recap, in last week’s blog, I discussed in detail the following five factors:
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Effective program management
Strong support from the executive champion
Clear goals and specific performance targets
Experienced program manager
Availability of resources
In this blog, I will focus on the following CSF:
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Deliverables every two to four months
Inspiring the team
Measuring the effectiveness of the communications
Sharing knowledge
Training
As in the previous blog, these factors are listed in a random order. Depending on your
project, some of these factors may have a higher level of urgency and therefore should be
prioritized.
1. Major deliverables every two to three months. Major deliverables during the
transition should be scheduled every two to three months to ensure proper project
direction, demonstrate progress, and control scope. Communication will be
instrumental to ensure that the impacted constituents are kept abreast of the
progress. While working with the City of Cleveland CRM implementation we
held two change management meetings each month. Assignments from the
previous meetings were shared and typically consisted of the following:
a. Internal and external communications plan updates
b. Re-designed business processes
c. Results from coaching interviews with impacted employees
2. Inspiring the team. CRM projects call for an intensive effort from key team
members over an extended period. If not properly managed, the project
implementation can result in burnout and turnover, which could have an adverse
impact on the project timeline and budget. The team leaders must inspire the team
to put forth effort when it is needed and then properly reward the team at the
appropriate time. Engagement and buy-in at an enterprise-wide level is required.
It is not sufficient if only the executives demonstrate the buy-in. Projects are often
won or lost in the trenches. This is where front-line and middle management
personnel provide the adhesion that enables the changes to “stick”. A project I
recently started with a Midwestern city provides a perfect example. The city
manager helped establish the vision that the city desires to have a best-in-class
© Stern Consulting, Inc., 2013
non-emergency call center. His passion translated into getting staff level excited
by this vision and clamoring to play a meaningful role in the project.
3. Measuring the effectiveness of the communications. The organization should
consider deploying a mechanism to assess the effectiveness of its communications
effort. If this is absent, they will be unable to gauge if its messages are heard or
understood. A set of performance metrics should be created to measure the
tactic’s effectiveness. When I helped launch Baltimore’s CRM system, we
utilized several communications tactics to share results. The ones that exhibited
the “biggest bang for the buck” were those focusing on the financial metrics and
cost savings that the city achieved. Since those appeared to resonate most with the
target audiences, more financial-based marketing tactics were developed.
4. Sharing knowledge. Large-scale change projects create demands for new skills.
Sharing knowledge among the project team members is a critical success factor in
developing new skills and disseminating insight. Technology enables this. My
clients in Carlsbad, CA and Elgin, IL have developed a simple-to-use SharePoint
site to collaborate and share information. In addition, Elgin is investigating
utilizing social media options such as You Tube and Facebook to distribute
content on a real-time basis.
5. Training. Training is an opportunity to educate the organization’s staff and
constituents about changes that a new project will deliver. In addition, it can serve
as a feedback vehicle for the core change management team. Training can take on
a number of different forms and channels. The training should focus on educating
organization’s staff about the large-scale change. When developing the training
program, individual learning styles should be considered. While working with
Santa Ana, CA, the change management leaders utilized multiple forms of
training including:
a. Classroom/workshop-based
b. Web-based, self-paced
c. On-the-job
d. Experiential
Let me close with the following questions:
1 – Can you share any examples of the issues that arise when these
factors are not followed?
2 – Can you think of other critical success factors?
Tune in next week when we discuss how to select change management champions.
© Stern Consulting, Inc., 2013
Spencer Stern specializes in assessing the business and process impact of new
technology-based solutions, ranging from enterprise-wide software systems to wireless
communications networks. In 2008 he launched Stern Consulting where he continues to
focus on assessing the financial impact of large-scale municipal strategic
implementations. He can be reached at: spencer@sternconsultinginc.com
For more information, please visit:
www.sternconsultinginc.com
© Stern Consulting, Inc., 2013