| An auditable and “performance metrics-loaded” change management process helps managers maintain control over their operations and projects. The ability to manage change effectively brings about stability and thus freeing up resources for innovations and skills upgrading.
I will discuss various aspects of change management over several articles. Follow me over the next few months as I attempt to break down change management into easier bite size for your understand and application.
Many are resistance to change. Yet, changes are unavoidable for better or for worse. With that in mind, our performance is gauged by how well we can manage change. You must develop a plan for change. It should be generic when you first draft it and as you execute your plan for numerous changes in your organization, you will be able to customize the plan specific to your environment.
Be it that y
ou are managing a project or an operation, you need a change management plan in place to accept, process, implement and monitor the changes. If you have no plans at all for your operations or projects, at the very least, develop a Change Management Plan. If you need help on this, feel free to contact me.
A good change process is ready for audit anytime and has good metrics tagged to it for performance reporting. You must incorporate “test points” in your change process to perform quality assurance testing. For example, if you have regular CAB meetings, you need to be able to provide evidence that the meetings actually took place and actions were taken according to the plan.
By defining key metrics for change process, managers can get a good picture on change activities and whether resources are sufficient to handle all the incoming change requests. A good report will help you make sound decisions but if you have many metrics in a report that you do not use, you will be wasting your resources to collect these measurements. Finally, do not implement metrics that are difficult to measure. You are not going to ask your staff to go through a few databases and emails just so that you can capture certain set of data for the report (worse still if you do not know what you want to do with those data). Take your time to find out what you need, then build an automatic process/tool to collect the required data.
Building a change management plan takes time. Do not rush into it. Have at least a monthly review with your team with the intention to seek continuous improvement. Get your team to buy in and own the process by letting them develop it with your guidance.
I welcome you to share your experience with me.
[...] Getting started with Change Management » Creative Management [...]
“Many are resistance to change…” I find this a lot in senior management levels whose obsess with cultural or organization’s behavior, with experience on top.
This makes it more exciting to launch a change initiative in the organization. What I did was to understand their reason for resisting the change and find a compromising ground for the project to move on.
Seriously, look at it this way, our approach may not always be right. Their resistance may be valid.
Change is continuous and quick for IT organization: documenting change is a bigger problem than resistance to change.
Excuses for not planning change include (1) saying implemented un-planned changes fall below the radar of stakeholders, or (2) are ‘operational only’, and that documenting them slows the organization down. But systems fail when a step is missed, or another system relies on a newly-changed interface. Detailed change management helps solve either situation, but, like traffic signs in front of schools, it usually takes a disaster before management accepts the extra staff time and effort, and mandates change planning.
Automated change detection systems help resolve problems, but they don’t help change planning, and they’re yet another system to maintain.
Best is to demand change planning after a disaster, and, following Vince’s point, to put in as simple and light-weight a system as possible, tracking only key metrics.
Charles
I have to agree fully on the effort required ensure all changes are adequately documented. This will be in my next article on change management.
Would you like to contribute on this topic regarding change documentation? Please write to me at tschew@gmail.com.
Cheers!
Good short & simple article. I’d love to know more about implementing Change Management in an operational environment.
Do you have a twitter account tht I could follow as well ?
Cheers,
Nitin Malhotra PMP
Hi Nitin,
My twitter ID is VinceChew
Let me know the challenges you are facing in your environment. I do agree with following strictly to the books when implementing process because we have to take into account cultural differences, business environment, process maturity of the company, etc..
Hi – just adding a little bit on something that I’ve used to manage change requests, and found very useful.
I use a “Level of Effort vs Customer Satisfaction” grid as a quick and dirty (but effective) way to assess which change requests (CRs) a project manager should focus on, and how best to communicate reasons for doing so to senior executives – all on one PowerPoint slide.
The grid can be found on:
http://www.poddarco.com/2009/04/02/quickwins/
This helps categorize CRs as Quick Win CRs, Difficult CRs, Light Weight CRs and Heavy Weight CRs and prioritize them.
Cheers
-V
Hi
This is an excellent idea to get the team focused on the stake of Change Requests that need prioritization and actions.
I am going to apply this approach on all my projects and update the community on the impact and alterations.
[...] fixes to a problem while others require simple change in parameters or business logic. The change management process must be strictly followed to minimize changes failures and disruption to operation. I would suggest [...]
[...] Getting started with Change Management [...]
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