What are the most effective methods for evaluating change impact?

It can be a quick survey; or it can be a longer, more thorough look at the entire organization, all the components that will be impacted e.g. changes to processes, technology, new products, culture and to what degree. … the level of training needed for users/groups … the type of communications needed for users/groups … where you need change agents to help with change support … where you’re likely to get the most resistance to the change … what types of job role guides & documentation you’ll need … which processes, procedures, software & systems are changing

Often we outline the task and things we want to change without sharing why we want to change it. Having a clear aim sets the impetus for change.

Understanding the scope and objectives of the change is one of the first steps, but the very first step should be understanding and gathering a baseline of information about the current state. It's difficult to measure improvement or the articulate value of a change investment if you don't understand your starting point. Example: implementing a new process to improve patient safety. The new process could be clearly defined, but it will be difficult to measure how much safer patients will be after the process is rolled out if there isn't any data about the current state to measure against.

Doing a bit of research on the past helps you to define the current state better. Not only that, it gives you loads of information on how to manage the current situation. Then moving on to understand the impact becomes much more clearer. It is a process of diagnosing the impact and breaking it down to many activities. In this way people around you equally will understand the need to do certain activities as each activities will manage a small part of a bigger impact. Going directly to analysing impact and developing action towards managing it might even create its own resistants.

A constructive alignment with different groups allow for the ship to be steered towards the same direction. Using qualitative tools like maps and surveys give insights to sentiments that could create unnecessary friction in change without concerns or needs address.

Do NOT get mixed up between gap analysis and impact analysis. When you put the delta of the As-Is vs To-Be of change in the analysis, that's gap analysis. Change impact happened when you question "then what?" after the gap analysis. When you put only gap analysis in the change impact analysis, you will find a circular loop of solutionings in the impact initiatives result.

Assessments are important - it gives an impartial, transparent, and measurable metric for change readiness and effectiveness. Pairing sentiments making, change strategy, and data analysis like six sigma creates a powerful trifecta.

Don’t ask me – my risk appetite is large. I believe you need to be agile and have the right people in place to respond to unexpected issues. The right people is more important that the right plan.

Early on it's critical to work with stakeholders to define success. Once you've chosen your KPIs and areas of measure, you'll want to get granular. The value of business impact, if structured in generalities like increase or decrease of metrics, can be interpreted differently by stakeholders. Be absolutely specific in how much of an increase or decrease in each KPI constitutes appropriate progress or change project success. You'll reduce the potential for confusion and frustration, and will smooth the path to successful change.

It’s important to set the metric – it takes the ego out of impact into data-driven analysis. A methodology helps you know for certain that what you’re doing is working… down to the decimal.

Often, stakeholders may not know the current state process flow beyond their SME portion. Or due to their maturation, they may not have SOPs or documentation. They also may not know exactly how they want the future state to be. When I encounter this, I leverage visual workflows that document the current state and d future state processes. Walking them through this enables them to verify/add/edit the steps and “what if”s. Then, I show the future state workflow proposal and it gets the to react, ask questions, and share the impacts. Capture those impacts to share as part of communications and training needs analysis.

As well as being an advocate for continuous monitoring to track change success over time (and most importantly using this as evidence to fix problems where it has not been a success!) there is nothing more powerful than story telling. Collect and share success stories and case studies that highlight the positive impact of change to learn from, and do not shy away from communicating what you are doing about the not so positive case studies too.

CHANGE BREAKDOWNS DELAY THE PROGRESS Any initiatives are about rational deliverables of change from as-is to to-be. The actions to be taken are technically hard skills. When you communicate the rational changes and expect the affected people respond rationally, the fact is that people often react emotionally. Shock, denial, resistant to change is the emotional reaction that will affect the progression of the project or initiative, which needs soft skills. Fail to address and effectively tackle change issues will delay the progress of your initiative.