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 Change Management Delivery Capability

The Change Management Office function is fully integrated with the Enterprise Portfolio Management and investment evaluation processes. Change Management Principles and Practices are completely integrated in project, program and the portfolio methodology and ways of working.

Projects are designed with clearly defined vision of change and multi-disciplinary teams are involved in the development of the business case to ensure business impacts, key change management activities, resource and appropriate budgets are considered fully at the initial concept stage.

Project delivery teams are working with business areas to integrate their feedback and where required are adjusting plans to support effective adoption of new ways of working.

From a practitioner perspective you will be working with integrated change management principles and practices that are embedded within the organisation’s project delivery framework. Project delivery teams and change leaders are trained in change management principles and practices as a way of working in the organisation rather than it being a separate ‘thing’ to learn.

The Change Management Practitioner role has shifted into more of an influencing and coaching role to support business areas design and drive changes in their local areas. Change Agent Networks are working with senior leaders and executive to drive the change agenda and working with the Community of Practice to ensure change management principles and practices continue to improve and evolve to suit the organisations rate of change.

Remember that Strategy & Leadership is only one the three focus areas of change management capability. It's important that organisations also have balanced capability across each the focus areas and their components of success.