Approach and Products - Business Change Planning

This page describes how we can help you and lists the typical products/ deliverables you can expect on a consulting assignment.

Approach

1)  Health check

An independent review of your infrastructure, governance, processes, documents and skills related to the ‘change management’ of your programme of work.  The output would be a report with recommendations

2)  Business case for change

This may have been done already by the programme/project manager responsible for developing the capability that will enable change. However, if you are looking to instigate change yourself (rather than it being imposed centrally), we can work with you to develop, quantify and document the business case for change

3)  Design and facilitate Change Impact and Readiness workshops

In order to prepare for change you need to engage with those people affected by the change. This can be done in workshops during which we would typically:

a.  Get the project managers to present so that everyone attending the workshop has a common understanding of what is changing and why

b.  Ask the workshop participants to discuss, capture and assess (score) what the change means from a range of perspectives: the whole business, technology, processes, as individuals and as teams

c.  Get feedback on the level of preparedness for and likely resistance to change (using a questionnaire that would have been designed before the event). We would also consider using techniques such as Force Field Analysis so that action plans can be drawn up

4)  Create Business Change Plan

Change has to be owned by the business - not by the programme or project manager giving you the tools with which to effect change. Accordingly the Business Change Manager will need to develop a Business Change Plan incorporating the following elements:

• Vision

• Objectives or critical success factors

• Benefits Realisation Plan (incorporating benefit profiles)

• Milestone plan showing what the business needs to do to prepare to receive, implement and then exploit the changes. The milestone plan should also identify the specific activities needed to tackle the issues identified in the change impact/readiness workshops described above

• Risk management plan

• Stakeholder management plan

• Communication plan, including setting up if appropriate a network of change champions

• The method for monitoring and reporting performance related to: benefits realisation, milestone achievement, risk and issue management, stakeholder management, resource management. More and more organisations are using the Balanced Scorecard to manage their programmes of change

• Development of performance indicators to facilitate monitoring and reporting performance

• Governance and decision making processes

• Accountability, roles and responsibilities
  

We can help you create and document the Business Change Plan. This would be done partly in workshop and working one-to-one with the Business Change Manager and other key people affected by the change

5)  Stakeholder Analysis and Management

A structured approach is used to identify and categorise stakeholders; understand their importance and current/desired level of engagement; and then produce an action plan to pro-actively manage them. This would normally be done in a workshop.

6)  ‘Critical Friend’ advice

You can on an ad hoc basis (normally facilitated by a call-off contract) to provide advice and guidance

7)  Training

An off-the-shelf training course in Business Change Planning is available. There are other related training packages that can be delivered covering: performance measurement; Balanced Scorecard; and benefits realisation. Please see the training page on this website for more information

Products

Here are typical products/deliverables you can expect from a Business Change Planning and Implementation assignment:

1.  Health check report and recommendations

2.  Workshops to assess and prepare for readiness for change and associated report

3.  Business change plan

4.  Stakeholder action plan

5.  Demonstrable and measurable skills transfer

6.  Training courses

If you have any questions, or would like to discuss how we might be able to help you, please send an e-mail to:

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