Moving to the Next Change Management Maturity Level

It is not unusual for organisations to experience an imbalance with maturity across Strategy & Leadership, Business Readiness & Adoption and Change Management Delivery. We know that project change management capability is the easiest of the three change management capability focus areas to develop.

Once organisations have defined change management capability they often start to stagnate. This can be due to that fact they often invest heavily in their project management capability focussing on processes and governance, and miss key change management principles and practices that support the adoption of new ways of working; typically because they miss developing strong change leadership and investing in business readiness capability.

When creating your capability development plans, it’s important to consider tactics to support capability within your Strategy & Leadership and engaging your business areas not just project change management which is typically the more obvious of the tactics.

Effective Change Management Capability is supported by four key components—People, Process, Structure and Tools & Technology. These need to be present across all three focus areas of change maturity—Strategy & Leadership, Business Readiness & Adoption and Change Management Delivery.

At this point in the game, if your organisation doesn’t have a Change Management Office function, it’s time to set one up to support the growth of change management capability across the organisation.

Growing your Business Readiness & Adoption Capability

Business areas are actively involved and actively engaged in the shaping and adoption of new ways of working across the organisation. Managers have the skills to lead their teams through change and can view and track their specific change impacts across the portfolio.

Quality conversations underpin how the organisation communicates because change leaders understand that communication is a key factor that makes or breaks a change initiative. Development programs are founded in the concept of having quality conversations underpinned by neuroscience and industry leading coaching techniques. It also integrates planning, task management and delegation skills in the foundations of leadership.

Formal change agent networks are integrated into business forums and have connections into executive feedback cycles. These networks are a key aspect of business engagement across projects, programmes and portfolios and drive continuous improvement of change management principles and practices.

Opportunities to formally develop change management skills are formalised through professional development pathways, peer mentoring programs and supplemented by coaching support from change management practitioners.