You’re a change management professional. What hard skills should you focus on to stay competitive?

Given my experience with Change Management, I believe following skills are extremely critical to lead the change successfully & have broadly put them in 5 categories : 1. Change Leadership - Communicate for impact, Collaboration, influencing abilities, Resilience, Good Listener, empathetic and extremely focused & result oriented 2. Project Management 3. Data Management & Analysis 4. Technology orientation & usage 5. Understanding of Change Management Models

The change projects I have worked on that delivered the highest quality outcomes had strong project management as a backbone. Detailed planning, proactive risk management and honest transparency to stakeholders. A defined methodology and professional project management software (not MS Office) make project quality easier to achieve.

To master project management, while a good starting point would be around the learning of appropriate tools, I would like emphasise here another key parameter: the discipline. Indeed I have seen too many PMs (most of them to be completely honest) who are starting management with enthusiasm, energy and commitment but... just for a limited time. Managing a project require more discipline; this means continuous effort over the life time of the project. This lack of persistance represents probably the root cause of failure. Therefore if you want to master project management, you need first to work on your on your stamina and your ability to sustain an effort. You must see this like a marathon. Are you ready for such a race ?

In my opinion, the hard skills needed were project management, data analysis, decision-making, conflict resolution, and the ability to inspire staff members throughout the change process. You also needed to be able to communicate effectively with change agents via weekly emails to establish the concept and orient them to the various techniques to handle the change period.

For project management some hard skills needed are Estimation/Team management/Quality management/Stakeholder management/Scope or Change management/Communication management and overall Project & Program management. A valuable certification to develop and demonstrate project management skills is the Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (PMI). PgMP is another useful certification. Today an increasing number of projects are executed using the Agile methodology. Hence Scrum master experience and certifications like CSM and PSM are invaluable. Also go for PAL/CAL to include flavours of Agile leadership. That said, I personally prefer a combination of both hands on experience and certification.

Once you have your data analyzed you should know where you need to change or update your management system and strategy to meet a new challenge

Data analysis is key in understanding the performance of a change portfolio. However, this only works if the data frameworks are good and that the data being input into the systems are also good. As a change management professional, you need to invest time into understand the data flows and thus which pieces of data can be trusted and which pieces of data require testing or validation.

Ma?trise des outils et des technologies de gestion du changement : à mesure que les entreprises adoptent de nouvelles technologies et méthodologies, il est essentiel de rester à jour avec les outils et les plateformes utilisés dans le domaine de la gestion du changement. Cela peut inclure des systèmes de gestion des modifications, des logiciels de collaboration en ligne, des outils d'analyse des données, etc. La ma?trise de ces outils vous permettra d'optimiser votre efficacité et d'offrir des solutions adaptées aux besoins de vos clients.

Transparenz und Datenanalyse sind für mich der wichtigste Schlüssel für erfolgreiche Projekte. Um das Projektteam in die Umsetzung zu führen gerade auf der Werteebene. Welche Werte werden im Team gelebt, was sind die aktuellen Hindernisse etc.. Hierzu eigenen sich sehr gut strukturierte und wissenschaftlich basierte Umfragen. Dies bietet ein Fundament auf welches zu einem starken Projektteam führt und mit welchem alles erreicht und aufgebaut werden kann. Daneben braucht es weiterhin Dashboards um den klassischen Projektfortschritt darzustellen und transparent machen zu k?nnen.

Relevant data analysis starts with collection of quality data. Indeed, you can perform of the possible analyses but if your data set is not from premium quality, the results will be obviously not accurate. Collecting data starts will a strict definition of the required information to address a specific topic/issue. The more specific you will be, the more relevant will be your analysis. From my experience, stay focus and the solution will appear like magic ;-)

A core competency for change managers is a thorough understanding of established change management models like Kotter's 8-Step Change Model or ADKAR. These frameworks provide a structured approach to guide the planning, implementation, and reinforcement of change.

Doing a change without guiding the affected ones along the way, will never work. You can deliver the most wonderful futuristic solution; or even outstanding process/ way of work... BUT if you forget to onboard users - you are left alone. Change management framework are helping us understand what is happening and we need to train hard #communication #skills to be able to use these frameworks right. Keep in mind - it is not cruscial to understand it > you must use it!

Compétences en analyse des données et en intelligence artificielle : L'analyse des données joue un r?le de plus en plus important dans la gestion du changement. La capacité à collecter, à interpréter et à utiliser les données pour prendre des décisions éclairées est un atout précieux. De plus, avec l'intégration croissante de l'intelligence artificielle dans les processus de gestion du changement, il est utile de comprendre les concepts fondamentaux de l'IA et d'être en mesure d'appliquer ces connaissances pour améliorer les résultats.

Models help you structure your approach and your client conversations. It helped me a great deal to understand various aspects of the mechanics of change. What to always keep in mind though is that a model is a only a model - don;t get hung up on it too much. My advice would be to study the various models, see how they apply to your daily work. Take time to reflect on the things you learn. Change remains a human thing: a model will never capture the reality of what you are working on.

Change leadership is an essential resource of managerial vision. It must in fact be able to support employees in a moment of social and economic transformations which disrupt work routines. The first quality of effective leadership is based on maintaining the skills of employees and identifying their new needs so that they can be agents of change.

In the quest to adopt new and updated technologies to support the organisational goals and process, don't miss out on 'solving for X' = 'people' in the equation. Hence, all change should be centred around people and the outcome we seek - userization. Key points to consider: 1. Start with the end in mind. 2. Flip the script: Make technology user-savvy. 3. Focus on Usability and Simplicity: The tech should work for the user, not the other way around. 4. Contextualization: Generic stuff is 'fluff'. Every user needs help in the 'flow of work'. 5. Empowering Users: Think - how can you bring down the 'knowledge discovery time'?

L'adoption de la technologie est très importante dans tous domaine et toute pratique accompagnant le changement ou de simples projets. De plus, elle permet de rester compétitif et de faire face à la concurrence, c'est aujourd'hui un incontournable. Mais plus que jamais, l'utilisation de la technologie doit avoir au centre de ses préoccupations les éléments suivants: - Renforcer l'implication de tous les acteurs, parties-prenantes, utilisateur...en charge du projet ; - L'Empowerment des utilisateurs ; - Rendre son utilisation facile et ludique/gamifiée ; - La customisation en fonction des besoins/contexte des organisations/utilisateurs.

In my experience the best outcome you can achieve when adopting new technologies both to excel in your ongoing business and to build up new capabilities for the future.

Depending on the specific context of your organization, familiarity with additional tools and techniques like Visio for process mapping, or ITIL for IT service management, can be beneficial.

As AI (Artificial Intelligence) becomes more and more prevalent in our daily lives, it becomes paramount to ensure we both understand and apply its capabilities in the workplace. It can be as simple as speeding up an Associates mundane tasks, or as complex as solving high importance problems to improve efficiencies in the supply chain. Technology adoption is no longer a nice-to-have, for many, it is a must-have.

From my perspective, change leadership is all about empathy. Many leaders view a change that is beneficial to the company as a slam-dunk but unfortunately see any resistance from team members as dissent. Leaders need to see that when we discuss change we are disrupting our team. Consequently, it is so important to view the proposed change or improvement from the customer’s perspective as well as the viewpoint of our team member.

Apart from the listed hard skills, as a Change Management leader one shall focus on the overall know how of the change being implemented. Technical know how of the change being implemented is also very important. Various tools, techniques and methodologies will support the implementation. However, vision, proactiveness and people confidence will pave the way for being successful.

At the heart of effective change management lies change leadership. Without strong leadership, even the most powerfully crafted plans can't go far. Effective communication is a crucial part of strong change management leadership, as clear and compelling communication is essential for articulating the vision for change, addressing concerns, and fostering engagement among team members. Understanding the needs, perspectives, and concerns of all stakeholders also allows change management professionals to gain buy-in and support, ensuring smoother sailing throughout the change journey. By cultivating a diverse skill set and embracing the challenges of change, we can lead organizations to new horizons of growth and resilience.

Change management without Leadership can quite easily turn into chaos, can lose momentum, or can take a different direction. Change Leadership helps to stay on track despite necessary course corrections. It enables team cohesiveness and endurance in overcoming disruptions and hiccups, which are a part of any successful change management initiative.

A key part during any change process is getting people buy in. I find all of us to various degrees are both excited and frightened by chance. The ability to detect these levels across a wide number of people, identify main ways of conveying your vision, getting people's buy in and ensuring they stay with you on the journey is one of the most important ingredients, if not the key to sucess during change.

Communication skills is extremely critical in change management. Devising Communication strategies and planning is very important. Understanding organization culture, employee psychology is highly essential

Don’t believe you are relevant. The organization to change is the star. The people in the project team are the heroes. To let them shine and make them successful is the ultimate goal of the project and change manager. You are in best case the trainer, and a great trainer will make a group of average or below average performers a team of superior performers. We all know such examples from sports. Different to artists who may be reminded after generations, a change manager‘s work will be forgotten after short time (or the person has sunken the ship). Knowing this mechanism may support you staying modest.

PMI calls them power skills. Make sure you have the emotional intelligence, communication, leadership, and influencing skills to deliver change.

A very important and very often neglected hard skill is the ability to identify value drivers being affected by the change and decompose them into relevant KPIs and metrics that will measure the impact of change. When this is done poorly, the case for change lacks clarity on how impact will be created or selects metrics in a somewhat arbitrary way - they might have some relation to the change, but there is no clear path from these metrics towards value creation. Similarly, analytics becomes and arbitrary and ad hoc selection of metrics that intuitively might relate to the change but lack the clarity of measuring how business outcomes are being affected.

Business analysis skills are important to analyse change needs and impact to identify benefits, You can then communicate the WIFIM to stakeholders.