By Hanna Greenfield, Marketing Manager, Changefirst

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In the next few blogs I will share some real-life stories of how some of our clients handled specific change issues. If you would like to share a change management story (what worked well, what didn’t work) with other change practitioners, please get in touch!

Engaging the Organization in the Redesign of a Department Structure
Our change team was tasked with designing a new department structure in a phase of strong growth and an increasing number of projects that needed to be managed.

As a result of resource constraints and high work load there had been lots of communication problems and even personal conflicts within the department. Also, there were fundamentally different views within the department on what the best solution should look like.

Due to previous changes in the upper management levels, the acting head of department had been appointed on an interim basis with only limited experience and know-how in that particular field.

Before the solution was designed, we utilized e-change^® to build a Change Network Map. This helped us identify the different roles of our employees and managers within the change process. In particular, identifying the people who were influencers was a valuable step in the process.

Using the Change Network Map, the next task was to plan people’s involvement in the change. Having identified the influencers, we conducted individual talks with these individuals in order to gather their different views for the best solution for the restructuring of a fast growing department.

As a result, the change team knew about the preferences and possible resistances and was able to incorporate these aspects for the nomination of change agents and for building the communication strategy. We used the Adapter Readiness Assessment and Resistance Reasons Assessments that are both available in e-change to help identify the key risks issues. The Roadmap planning tool then helped us work out a plan to deal with these issues and present a viable plan to senior management.

Thanks to the intensive involvement of the employees of the department we gained a better picture of the causes for the recent communication problems and of the predominant expectations. The early engagement of the organization helped to build a sustainable department structure and created a broader acceptance of the change management solution.

Looking back now we were able to create sustainable change in redesigning a department structure by using analytical data to identify key influencers, change readiness and specific resistance issues. The diagnostic tools used in this case are available on a subscription basis on Changefirst’s enterprise change management platform – e-change^®.

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