Recently, IMA president Don Harrison led a webinar entitled, “Change Challenges: Extreme Edition” in which he discussed the extreme challenges faced by organizations during transformational change. For the past 30+ years, Don has focused his work on helping organizations to implement large-scale, complex changes in organizations.
Step into almost any organization on the planet and we bet you will hear the same buzzwords flying around. Whether they are on a scenic, motivational poster hanging on the wall or being overused by people during a meeting, these terms are usually jargon laden phrases that are often related to whatever management trend happens to be going on at the moment. “I’ll champion that” and “We like to empower our employees” are just a few examples of phrases we’ve heard this past week alone.
The 5 W’s. Who, what, where, when, why and how. These are the questions journalists ask when they are researching their next story. But in the Change Management and implementation worlds, asking these same questions can be just as important. An excellent example of this is in gaining clarity around roles and responsibilities during an organizational change. Yes, this seems basic, but it is a critical step for implementation success.
Transitioning to a Shared Services model is one of the most common transformational changes we see in our Change Management Consulting work. The rationale for this type of enterprise-wide change is clear-- why support redundant services such as IT, Human Resources, Financial and/or Legal, in each organizational silo when there can be one corporate-wide resource that is shared? But… the question is… are organizations achieving true benefit realization from their Shared Services implementations?
Nothing is as important to project success as Sponsorship. Nothing. But, unfortunately, securing lasting, active Sponsors is one of the biggest hurdles faced by Change Agents during any organizational change. In order to help you secure Sponsors for your next project, we’ve put together a list of the top 5 Sponsor-related myths-- and a reality check to go with each one.
How many changes does your organization have planned for this upcoming year? We are guessing it’s quite a few. Whether your plate is full with organization restructuring, new technology, process improvement, or any other change where people need to do things differently, you will ultimately be faced with two options: You can either invest in building readiness now, or you can spend your resources managing resistance later. You can’t avoid this dilemma; it’s inevitable! But the good news is that you do have a choice, and the best choice is pretty obvious.
What Should Change About Change in 2016 - A Letter from Don Harrison
Dear Change Professional,
With the holidays behind, it's time to plan for the year ahead. The beginning of a new year is an opportunity to look forward, and think about what we should do differently. Here are three thoughts based on my continued global Field Research on organizational change:
Getting all Sponsors to express, model and reinforce their commitment to your change is the single most important factor in getting a business change implemented at speed. What is the best way to do that? By developing Sponsor contracts for every Sponsor whose commitment is critical to the project’s success.
Imagine you are driving 65 miles an hour along the highway and your “check engine” light comes on. What do you do? If that happened to us, we would pull over immediately and assess the situation. Would we have the same reaction if the “low windshield wiper fluid” light illuminated...definitely not.
One of the reasons why organizations are struggling to get their change agendas accomplished is that there is, well, just way too much re-structuring! Every time a new leader comes on board, it seems that the first required action is to re-structure—again. We have clients who literally have had 5 new bosses in the last 6 months. This means new expectations, new ways of operating, new priorities. It’s one of the reasons why so many people find their heads spinning!
