Typically, people have a relatively common reaction to change: for many, denial or fear leads to resistance, often linked with anger or depression. And it is only when these are explored and worked through that staff come through the other side and exhibit acceptance and, most importantly, commitment.

We can all relate to these emotions based on our own experiences. However, it is important to recognise that some people thrive in a changing environment and quickly adapt, while others resist strongly and dwell in negative emotional states.

The key to successful change management is gaining an understanding of how individuals may react and then supporting them as they move through the emotional change curve to achieve acceptance and adoption of the changed business environment as quickly as possible.

Countering the rumour mill
One of the issues that many businesses face is that they see change management as a largely ‘tangible’ process, primarily focused around internal communication and staff training.

They often fail to realise that, as soon as change is perceived to be imminent, internal discussions start. In such situations, staff inevitably begin to speculate about what the change might mean for them and, in the absence of solid information, create their own ‘facts’ to fill the vacuum.

As a result, by the time the solution is ‘clarified’, staff will often be concerned or even fearful about its implications and thus resistant to its implementation.

So, how can businesses minimise the negative effect of the ‘rumour mill’? In this situation, it is important to identify influential and respected people within the business and get them ‘onside’ as soon as possible.

These ‘change agents’ will then be able to lead the charge in terms of two-way communication. They can both proactively inform staff about what is known about the project and, based on discussions with colleagues, highlight what ‘unknowns’ are causing the most concern, before feeding this information back to programme leaders.

Effective change management requires a highly integrated, collaborative and proactive approach, working with all relevant stakeholders from day one in order to realise the anticipated business benefits at all levels - strategic, operational and financial:


Strategic
· Improves the organisation’s capacity to change (by establishing a learning organisation) - Planning is the key here. If a programme is not planned, understood and implemented effectively, it is likely doomed to failure, as staff become indifferent to the prospect of change and cynical about its likely implementation.
· Increases employee motivation and commitment. The key here is to align organisational goals to specific individuals, ensuring that staff are motivated and focused in the right direction and that they are clear about the likely benefits to them personally of the proposed change.
· Lowers resistance to change and increases motivation.


Operational
· Identifies Key Performance Indicators. Critically, at an operational level many businesses do not have a clear understanding of what their KPIs actually are. As a result, KPIs are not clearly communicated and staff are not empowered with the right kind of skills to meet them
· Increases quality and transparency of the change process
· Maximises user acceptance and adoption of change initiatives.


Financial
· Minimises consequential costs (e.g. eliminating rework and lowering support costs)
· Projects completed more rapidly, with faster realisation of ROI
· Minimises hidden transformation costs (e.g. reduced productivity).

In truth, it is often hard to pinpoint what specific financial benefits change management will provide an organisation. The best practice for businesses is to baseline current financial performance and to compare that to the position after changes have been implemented and on an ongoing basis thereafter. This enables businesses to track what the real improvement is.

Businesses often do not identify problems until it is too late. The output of ineffective change management will typically be staff leaving the business, productivity will be reduced, people will stop using the systems and fail to follow processes properly. These factors will all eventually have a negative impact on the bottom line.
 
Most change management projects within businesses are initially focused on a technology or a system change, often sponsored by an IT director or manager. The success of such projects often depends on how well such individuals understand corporate change management and how effectively they ensure that other representatives from across the business are involved.

Research shows that the vast majority of IT-driven change projects fail to achieve desired goals primarily due to poor user adoption. Case studies have identified a number of typical obstacles to implementing successful business change:
· Employee and/or management resistance, resulting in low user adoption
· Poor executive sponsorship: businesses need to appreciate that typically a significant number of managerial staff across the business will need to get involved in any change management activity -and particularly in scoping, designing and all other initial phases of the work
· Limited time, budget and resources
· Corporate inertia and internal politics

Further, the implications which unmanaged change can have an impact on the strategic, operational and financial aspects of an organisation include:
· Low staff motivation, impacting on customer satisfaction
· Failed change initiatives, restricting future change programmes (as the business becomes a ‘sceptical’ organisation)
· Decreased in revenue during transition phase, due to a slump in performance and productivity
· High consequential implementation costs required, to retrofit and integrate the solution to satisfy the business users and other stakeholders

A proactive approach
The initial dip in productivity that typically accompanies the roll-out of a new system is inevitably expensive to be a business. It is key to the success of any change management programme that that downturn in productivity is minimised. If it is prolonged, staff will become increasingly negative and disillusioned.

To avoid this, businesses need to provide training and communicate with staff in other ways so that they understand why change is happening. It is also important that avenues of communication are available to staff to become more involved in ‘owning’ the project by, for example, providing suggestions to members of the project team as to how specific processes could be improved.

The concept of business change management is not new. Furthermore, it is a practice that good management teams recognise as fundamental to the success of any initiative. However, the approaches used to deliver the benefits are still often far from effective. Thus, an organisation can not simply establish, say, a ‘stream’ or function within a large change programme and expect it to deliver the business change benefits.

‘Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I’ll understand.’

However, effective business change management requires more than just good communications and training. A deep understanding of individual stakeholders is required, to ensure the right people are involved in the right way at the right time - both throughout each project and on an ongoing basis - to maximise user understanding and adoption of change.

This means that change management activity needs to commence during the initial scoping of a project, ramp up during mobilisation, support implementation and then continue on an ongoing basis as a reinforcement of the change.

Thus, following scoping, the change programme should understand:
· The broader business environment and any possible areas of conflict from internal and external stakeholders
· The forecasted benefits and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from both an organisational and an individual level, in helping people understand ‘what’s in it for me?’
· How benefits and KPIs will be measured and monitored
· Who will be impacted, individual change requirements and the broader organisation’s readiness to change.

Once these considerations are understood, appropriate initiatives must be planned in collaboration with relevant work streams and then executed in a timely manner.

Sounds easy? Maybe so, yet organisations have stumbled or left these types of activities until key stakeholders are already ‘anti’ or appropriate initiatives have not been identified or properly planned. This can result at best in costly re-work and, at worst, whole projects being shelved or generally deemed to be failures.

Business sponsors must own the change
Although there are many professional service providers in the market that claim to specialise in change management, business sponsors must take ownership and lead the organisation.

Employees, managers and executives usually have the clearest ideas around what needs to happen for things to change. However they often lack the techniques, time and objectivity to carry them out properly.

On the other hand, if they are advocates for change and understand the importance of business transformation, they can have a hugely positive impact on how effectively the programme is structured - and ultimately on its overall success.

Finding the right partner to help guide your organisation and users through a change programme will be critical to the success of any change management programme.

Third-party consultants will typically have greater credibility and are likely also to have greater objectivity than in-house project staff in this area. Also by using an external partner, organisations can ensure that expensive in-house resource that might otherwise be used to perform this role, can instead be focused on the core business.

It is important to consider if the partner organisation concerned has practical ‘hands on’ experience delivering end-to-end projects and therefore understands what can go wrong. If they are only operating in a niche area or only provide specific change management consulting, the risk is that they become just another programme ‘silo’ operating independently of the core team and doing more harm than good.

The ideal implementation partner will have user adoption at the heart of everything they do. It will be a philosophy ingrained in the project team - from analysts and technical experts through to management teams.

With the right partner and the right people involved, designing and implementing the journey of change from scoping, through planning and execution, can be highly successful, whether implementing a new system, re-designing a process or restructuring an entire organisation.