Change Management Capabilities in Practice

By Hanna Greenfield, Changefirst



When researching organisational change management solutions, whether for individual projects or for enterprise capability building, the multitude of options and solutions can become overwhelming. Here at Changefirst we have worked with clients for 20 years, building change capability. Despite having a tried and tested methodology and online platform, we are often asked to tailor parts of our process to fit specific client needs. Educating clients and designing options that aren't “off-the-shelf” can take some time. This prompted me to write a blog post with a few mini cases of how some of our clients have tailored and embedded Changefirst's services to support capability building and change delivery success.

Perhaps some of these cases resonate with what your organisation is tackling. I look forward to reading your comments!

Integration with project management process – Network Rail

Network Rail recognised that managers have a pivotal and difficult role during periods of major change. Very often they have to manage the competing demands of dealing with a major change programme – or even a series of them – which impacts them personally in their role, whilst also having to deal with the reactions of their team to the same set of changes. Given the necessity for people to be engaged, and to feel a sense of ownership of their change programmes, the Network Rail change team shifted their focus to building and deploying plans for managing changes through people. Changefirst’s People-Centred Implementation (PCI®) methodology was selected as the framework to be used and integrated into the MSP framework, consequently forming an overarching change framework named MSP4NR.

Network Rail uses Changefirst’s e-change portal to access key change tools, e-learning and resources. Currently over 800 people within the organisation have learned and are applying and embedding PCI within their change programmes using e-change. Programmes are evaluated through the Adapter Readiness Assessment (ARA) in e-change which guides Go – No Go decisions. The tool highlights key risk areas for early action and enablers to success and it also supports change planning by offering tried and tested suggestions for practical action against each risk dimension. Once the Go decision has been reached, they use e-change tools for articulating a ‘shared change purpose’ and to build the change network map for each project. The change framework is now mandatory for all existing and new change programmes. For the Network Rail change programme team e-change is a productivity tool, allowing them to have all their change resources in one place to help standardise organisational change processes and improve project success rates.

Read the full Network Rail case study


Slashing change management training costs– Global Pharmaceutical Company

One of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies has been a Changefirst client for many years and has taken the approach to develop organisational change capability throughout the organisation. David Miller, Founder of Changefirst, talks about this level of change maturity in his blog Why leaders need Enterprise Change Management to become agile. He describes Enterprise Change Management (or ECM) as a “belief that if an organisation is to become agile and responsive to fast moving competitive, often disruptive, markets then it needs more than a small number of project or OD specialists trained in change management. Rather it needs the whole organisation to possess the appropriate skills and tools to help deliver change at the volume, speed and accuracy required.”

The client has over the years, working with Changefirst, fully adopted the PCI methodology for all change initiatives. But, they were finding it difficult to reach the next level of change management maturity, because it would require all employees affected by change to have an understanding of how to deal with change on a personal level. Giving employees this education through training workshops was taking the company’s training budget to 6 figures, until last year, when the company adopted the Changefirst e-learning programme for employees. The client is now putting 20,000 employees affected by change through the 1-hour Thriving Through Change – module in e-change, thus achieving considerable cost-savings in their training budget and gaining the ability to really embed internal change capability.

Collaboration on key global change initiatives – Global Service Company

Another client who employs over 200,000 people globally, wanted to transform a significant part of its information processing and servicing. A major part of the programme involved opening a number of new operating centres around the world. These would be supported by a new, leading-edge technology solution that would be used by virtually every employee in the organisation.

The project had massive people implications not only because of the number of people involved and the global scale of the project but because a substantial number of key technical employees would see their roles and responsibilities significantly changed. This in turn led to the need for them to embrace new behaviours and skills.

The leadership team engaged with Changefirst to upskill global and regional change agents; provide a consistent and powerful tool-kit through e-change; co-deliver workshops for leaders and coach key change agents. The leadership team wanted the emphasis to be on involving and skilling local change agents and leaders early in the process. The results for this client have been tremendous to date. The programme of work is reporting very high engagement levels, with key technical employees – who were a big concern – acting as key advocates for the project. The regional teams feel like they are part of the solution and have had ownership of the roll-out in their business units. And, the over-arching approach of providing skills, tools and coaching to internal agents has cascaded down the organisation with real pay-offs in terms of motivation and buy-in to what could have been a very risky program of work.

These are just a few examples of our work with clients facing very different change management challenges. Why not download our whitepaper A C-suite Guide to Building Organisational Change Capability which outlines the options available for embedding change management capabilities in your organisation.
Download A C-suite Guide to Building Organisational Change Capability

Tags: Change Management Training

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