Comparing Change Management Models: A Checklist to Use

Posted by Paula Alsher on Thu, Jan 25, 2018 @ 11:31 AM

In today’s business world where changes are happening with lightning speed, organizations simply do not have a second to spare for unimportant activities. The time your Sponsors and Change Agents spend on implementing changes needs to be laser-focused on moving the dial towards getting a change implemented quickly and successfully. Change Management Checklist

Whether it is new technology, operational efficiencies, or the introduction of innovative products and services, investing in a structured, research-based change management process (yes, like AIM) is the best way to ensure value realization is reached.

Evaluating a Change Management Methodology

But when there are so many change management options out there, many of which look alike, it can be difficult to decide which model is the best. The bottom line is your change management process should be focused on achieving the maximum impact from your limited resources in the shortest amount of time. {Click to Tweet}

If you are in the process of choosing a change management approach, or making sure what you have is right for your current strategic priorities, we’ve come up with the following checklist to ensure your framework will measure up.

A change management methodology should be:

  • Structured - Your change management model should be a structured process that is applied to business changes to manage the people side of a change with the same rigor and discipline used to manage the time, budget and scope of the project.

  • Focused on Business Outcomes - A change management methodology should be focused on total value realization as defined by the following five measures of success:

    1. On time
    2. Within budget
    3. Business Objectives
    4. Technical Objectives and
    5. Human Objectives

    Only when all five metrics have been met will you have full value realization and behavior change. Without behavior change, there is no true change, which, in turn, means Return on Investment has not been achieved.

  • Impact Based - You have a choice on how you spend your limited time and resources when it comes to change management. You can spend it completing a lot of checklists and templates or you can focus on high impact interventions (both planned and unplanned) in the moment. Change management processes that focus on impact are going to be far more successful than ones that focus on activity.

  • Flexible - The goal of change management shouldn’t be "to do" a process, but rather to have core principles guide you on what you should be doing, given the day-to-day project realities and challenges. Your change framework should be a repeatable process, but also one where you don't have to apply every step, every time. Some judgment should be involved in determining which strategies and tactics are needed, when.

  • Robust Enough to Address Complex Changes - Change can be complex especially when you are talking about enterprise-wide and transformational changes that cross multiple business units such as M&A or Shared Services implementations. A change management process based on the false concept that change is linear is not going to work for these real-world, intricate implementations!

  • Able to be Integrated with Other Business Protocols - Change management doesn’t happen in a hermetically sealed vacuum. Operational excellence programs such as Lean/Six Sigma are being used at the same time as project management protocols such as Agile. The ability to blend all of these processes from the start is the key to value optimization.
  • Focused on the Role of Leadership (Sponsorship) - If we’ve said it once we’ve said it a million times, Sponsorship is the single most critical success factor in ensuring a fast and successful implementation of any type of business change. Sponsors need to express, model and reinforce a change. That’s why a change management process that ignores the crucial role of Sponsorship is doomed to fail.

When it comes to choosing a change management model, there are a lot of choices out there. The Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM) is a flexible, but business-disciplined methodology that is based on more than 35 years of field research and operationalized research-based principles. It provides systemic, systematic principles strategies and tactics that can be blended with operational excellence and project management. In short, AIM was built to be next generation change management that helps you get change done…fast. So now we ask, which model will you choose?

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Topics: Change Management Methodology, Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM), Comparing Change Management Methodologies