Change management

Completing the delivery of functional, technical or physical aspects of any initiative is great, however this provides no guarantee of its success.

Your staff will need to be supported in adopting this new tool or technology feature or change in environment.

Do they understand why you are making these changes, can they be involved in implementing them, are they concerned about the impact on them, do they understand how to use any new system or tools.

Managing the change effectively can significantly improve your chances of success, thereby reducing friction and improving the chances of realising the value you intended.

Employee getting support related to change program

Change management planning

Preparing your organisation for any change requires some upfront planning. There are various methodologies that can be used to help guide you through the process (Kotter, ADKAR etc), essentially these all amount to following some critical steps.

Primarily this amounts to sharing the vision of why a change has been instigated, communicating clearly and openly, involving staff in shaping the change (where possible) and supporting them through the change (e.g. upskilling, mentoring, transition planning), providing feedback channels and actively listening to challenges.

Thought should also be give to how to mitigate foreseeable challenges be they blockers in the form of issues or people.

In preparing for the challenges ahead and planning how you will deal with them you can remove some of the friction associated with change, more quickly ending up in the new normal.

Click here >> prepare for your change journey today

Impact assessment

We will build up a broad picture of the change and its overall impact on the business and its staff.

How many staff are affected by the change? How dramatic is the change on those impacted? Will this likely result in changes to roles or redundancies? Will new skills or competencies be required? Will staff be likely to feel about this change?

Stakeholder mapping

We will identify key stakeholders in change, ensuring there is sponsorship at the right level. Also starting to identify potential change champions, those who may struggle to adapt and will need more support and finally those who are likely to be resistant to change.

Skills Audit

If there is significant change a skills audit may be advised. This will identify what skills (soft and hard) the business has amongst its staff, including skills that may have gone unnoticed as they were not relevant to existing roles.

This can be matched up against a map of what skills will likely be required to operate post change and form the part of skills matching, recruitment planning, or an up-skilling drive.

Communications plan

Clearly communicating is one of the keys to good change management.

The plan should encompass the key messaging for each stage of the change, who will provide the comms at each stage, the channels that will be used to disseminate and gather feedback, as well as setting out the core approach and tone of voice.

Identify blockers

We will lead you through a process that will help identify potential blockers, these could be points of principle, processes, culture, relationships or even some of the change resistant staff identified earlier.

These can then be prioritised in terms of the likelihood to occur and the potential impact on the process.

Mitigation plan

Finally taking into account the blockers identified a plan can be drawn up of how we will deal those issues, many will be unavoidable but having an approach in hand can mitigate the impact.

This should also confirm how emergent issues will be dealt with at pace as momentum in any change is critical.

"Spiderling Consulting helped us define our digital transformation needs. Their customer focused approach, coupled with expertise in change management, meant they were able to recommend ways of improving our customer experience, and internal processes, whilst supporting us to implement the changes successfully"

Stephen Lotinga

CEO, Publishers Association