What is Change Management?
Organisations, teams and departments have visions, plans and objectives for how they want operate in the future. These plans may be to become more digital, remove paper processes or change services offerings.
These visions are very unlikely to come to fruition on their own.
Change Management, succinctly put is a structured process to enable the desired future state to become the current state. Essentially an approach to create the desired future state.
Most importantly people are the catalyst for change. The biggest budget, the best project team and vision won’t create successful change without taking people on the journey.
People and Change
People have differing reactions to change, the Change Management process puts a great emphasis on identifying the Organisations capacity for change.
ADKAR Change Management Approach
ADKAR is one of a number of Change Management models. ADKAR is a model within the PROSCI change Management Methodology. If any of the five elements are weak or absent, the chang eis likely to fail or stall.
- Awareness
- Desire
- Knowledge
- Abilty
- Reinforcement
Awareness
Awareness is the step of creating the general awareness of the change. This includes, announcing the change, importantly the need for change and providing opportunity to people impacted by the change to question and seek clarification.
Sponsors and Stakeholders are obvious first areas for awareness and participants through all stages of the Change process.
Desire
Desire is a process of assessing the levels of acceptance and sponsorship of change. Varying degrees of buy-in will be found, change champions, neutral and resistant staff. It is critically important to understand who sits where on the scale and the impact of their engagement with the change.
Knowledge
This step is all about empowering staff to accept and adopt the change. This could be through training, up-skilling, mentoring and coaching.
Ability
This stage may include dry-runs, simulations or a controlled soft-launch of the change. Change and Adoption team work very closely with staff at this point and support and guide staff through the early adoption of the changes.
Reinforcement
This phase is geared towards establishing long term adoption of the change, often this step is the weakest as project budgets have run low, project teams may have moved on and the organisation may rush to close out of project mode.
Measure the adoption of the change, be aware of falling back to old processes. ensure there are good feedback loops and the Change Team continue to guide.
Reward quick wins and look to establish a continuous improvement process.
Is any man afraid of change? What can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And can you take a hot bath unless the wood for the fire undergoes a change? And can you be nourished unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see then that for yourself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature>
