Look at all the touted, published and marketed change approaches and you will see a pattern. It goes something like this-
Figure it out, find out who needs to be involved with it, get some people to tout it, tell everyone about it, train some people on it, divide it up into phases, push it/force it/coerce it, maybe measure it, get it adopted, make it stick.
Not bad. Many of the things I do with my own approach (which makes sense since my education, experience and exposure is a mix of all of them). Change and projects and tasks and phases have a whole lot of consistency within CM and with other disciplines.
Just one problem.
No one ever really knows what IT is. Or is that no one knows what it IS?
Ask them, from leader to practitioner to stakeholder, and you will get lots of versions, none of which wraps up the whole, has the right focus or leads with the right assumptions. The answers will have a lot to do with implementation. Or they will address people and resistance and difficulty. Or they will focus on the strategy of implementation (which is just a transition into the first sentence). Or they will say, “I do not know…and I am pretty sure the leaders do not either”.
IT is the overall change and everything that means.
The what we do, how we do it and when fall into place after the IT is defined. Really, honestly it does. When the IT is not clear and translated into a description all the effort somehow does not make IT happen.
If you are the ultimate owner of IT (the senior leader with the budget not the person given the role of implementation- see assumptions above) there are multiple versions to the answer, what is IT. Those answers have to do with individuals, roles, time, place, strategy, yes for many implementation, leadership etc. The “have to do with” must connect to a clear picture of the end state.
If you are that leader, see if you can give an IT answer to yourself for your current initiative (no current state, no gap analysis, no future state). A hint- your answer will describe the end, then it may illustrate what that means in terms of effort and participation and if the first two are clear it might have some specifics in terms of work effort.
I can honestly say that on my first round of asking this question of an executive I have never heard an answer that is not How or When. Oops.
