A perusal of a popular change management “kit” shows 24 templates and 14 assessments to be used for a change project.
Ask why.
- As the budget owning executive of strategic change question whether the tool will directly effect the accomplishment of your business objectives.
- Be leery of tools that create “report-outs” to justify work
- Look carefully at assessments and readiness
Readiness and Assessments
Honestly I think the stakeholders have grown out of these.
Mid level change consultants and internal consultants especially love this stuff. This is the chance to meet with people, champion the cause and, usually, do some old fashioned OD (organizational development).
Stakeholders often see this as a lack of direction (read reduced confidence in leadership, a change management killer) and “busy work” for the change team.
No one is ready for change if it is not clear, thought out and sensible. Readiness competed.
Assessment unless it is based on hard facts is subjective.
Since change management does not lend itself to easy facts (note I did say easy, they of course can come from chosen metrics) the assessment becomes one of the consultant, the sponsor or the champion. Somehow the stakeholders get lost in the shuffle.
So spend budget on defining end states and work back to fill in the where, the what, the who and the when. Then you can produce “assessments” that illustrate the stages on the path to the accomplishment of your objectives.
Tools to justify
Precious to the consultant or internal change agent are the tools to justify the time it takes to move executives, people and ideas forward.
Expensive to the organization are those tools.
Those tools that can not pass the why test are a lot like those meetings where there is no dialogue or realistic action plans. So find those meetings you get rid of the unneeded tools or find the unneeded tools and you can eliminate those tedious meetings.
Tool-less Practitioners
The consummate consultant creates the interactions that give them the opportunity to ask the questions that could fill in those tool forms.
Their notes probably look similar.
They can produce a report if needed (and paid for) but, if they are leading you to those business objectives and intuitively smoothing out the obstacles along the way, then when it comes to the time ($) needed to fill out the tools…
Why?