Plenty, but not what you think
Change management is responsible for:
- Helping stakeholders always know context of work
- Showing stakeholders the level of their needed participation
- Ensuring trust in leadership
- Translating and communicating project accountabilities
- Fulfilling the role of central empathetic mediator and communicator
- Always thinking horizontally and holistically
Change management is accountable for:
- The definition of the end state
Yes that is it.
The distinction between accountability and responsibility is crucial for effective change management. To keep the waters clear here, my definition of effective change is the reasonably speedy creation of the end state. So Change Management is doing what it takes to accomplish that.
What happens with most change initiatives is that they are thrown in the middle of the organization to manage. That happens to be a hotbed for accountability- both for measurement for decisions (good) and time wasting “covering of tracks” deliverables (bad). It also happens to be an area that is weak in responsibility for strategy (strategic implementation yes, corporate strategy no).
To have accountability you have to first define responsibility.To throw change management into the middle, or down the hierarchy, misses that step.
Accountabilities match well with lists. The list part of change management is well into the overall process and is the expertise of project managers.
The solution?
Any option that puts a front end change management role high in the organization will give the opportunity to address responsibilities so that accountabilities can be defined.
Those options can be a change management entity in your organization, a senior consultant brought in close (within minutes would be good) to the idea creation for the change, or a well developed internal change consultant with supreme confidence in their ability to hold their job.