Tapping into the growing need for such solutions, Changefirst seeks to help organisations to increase the success of major change programmes. The firm provides a cloud-based transformational change toolkit to consultants and companies. The SaaS toolkit provided by Changefirst, named Roadmap Pro, has the potential to yield value for consulting industry incumbents, as they are so often drafted in by clients to oversee complex change programmes.

“In the consulting industry we are seeing a trend for clients wanting to see digital tools and support for their complex projects,” said Changefirst’s founder David Miller. He claims that Roadmap Pro can offer a number of benefits for consulting firms, for example: increasing revenues by providing high quality organisation & change consulting, analytics and delivery support and differentiation providing a platform that maximises client capabilities and productivity.

Content rich solution

However, firms might still be sceptical of the need for an external tool to do something that in essence is already part of their core business, and something they theoretically know inside out. When previously asked by Consultancy.uk how Changefirst believes it can make inroads into the consulting sector, Miller noted that not all consulting firms have the same level of change management capabilities, and that the toolkit is designed to be tailored to firms, depending on their level of know-how. As a result, Miller explained, "the more capable firms can utilise Roadmap Pro to increase productivity, improve client delivery, consistency and to rapidly on-board new hires and contractors,” while less capable firms can use it for “the ability to rapidly increase their client-facing change management capabilities.”

First and foremost, Roadmap Pro is an ‘out-of-the box’ solution. It contains a set of tools, diagnostics and suggested tactics, based on Changefirst’s 24 years of work building organisational change management capabilities with clients. “The platform enables firms and their clients to plan collaboratively.”

Roadmap Pro’s dashboard displays key milestones associated with a change management plan – with completed tasks easy to view, and outstanding tasks highlighted in red – as well as a list of people who the list has been shared with. The creator of a plan can easily share it with other users either as a contributor who can make edits or a viewer who can simply see what needs to be done. These rights can be changed by the plan’s owner quickly, and at any time.

With the ability to quickly co-opt people into a plan, beyond the home screen, Roadmap Pro’s interface allows for a number of mechanisms to foster co-operation, as well as economising on time. Through the plan section, users can leverage the platform to initiate, lead and engage with change plans. Each of these subsections has an ‘information page’ – which provides step by step guides to the completion of a task. They also have an ‘activity page’ – which users can use to show they have performed one aspect of a task – and an option to ‘build the plan’.

Change planning

In terms of the deployment of a change plan, Roadmap Pro has a set of tools which are crafted to make the creation of tasks and criteria simple and intuitive. A set of default actions are created here every time a new plan is created, giving change management specialists a bare-bones overview of can also be edited with ease to produce more elaborate plans. Tasks here can be marked complete, or have their level of importance ranked – both important metrics for the tracking function of the software.

According to Miller, Changefirst has one of the largest change management databases in the world. “Change consultants and their clients can obtain access to this data via eleven diagnostic tools. These assessments can be easily sent out to respondents (in eleven languages) and the results are collected and displayed automatically. By creating an assessment, change management professionals can promote real-time analytics to their dashboard, meaning that their team can see the progress achieved by their project so far, while also being made aware of areas which are most in need of attention.”

The platform also boasts a graphs section, where users can additionally use information attained to benchmark their progress. Assessments are sorted according to type, allowing for insight into certain aspects of a project. “Again, this can help keep team members informed of progress, as well as providing an overview of the overall achievements and short-comings of a plan,” Miller concluded.