Change Impacts: Setting Your Project Up For Success

Embarking on an organisational change initiative without first considering the change impacts in a structured manner is a bit like an architect creating a blueprint for a building without first understanding the client’s requirements or even the building’s location.

Understanding the people impacts of a change on an organisation will allow you to develop a more effective change management strategy, inform the various change plans that are required e.g. communications and will determine the size of the change team required to achieve a successful outcome.  Also, conducting a change impact exercise will ensure a consistent view of the change among stakeholders and facilitate an enterprise view of all the changes in an organisation.

In this article I will show you three different approaches you can take to understanding change impacts; Prosci?’s Change Impact Assessment, using a change impact register and identifying the critical few behaviours. Also, we will look at when to sequence this activity and other considerations including distinguishing it from other project change activities.

As with all change management activities and tools, the context is key. If you are leading a change team on a major initiative or just conducting a quality review on a change initiative, the tools you use and the approach you take will probably differ. These three approaches can be used separately or together depending on the context, your preference, and your consulting approach.

Prosci?’s Change Impact Assessment

Prosci? provides two separate worksheets which I think work well together when considering change impacts. These are the Change Characteristics and the Organisational Attributes worksheets. Both worksheets contain a series of 12 questions where you rate various factors of the change on a scale of one to five, giving you an overall maximum score of 60.

In the Change Characteristics assessment, the factors considered include the number of impacted employees, the scope of the change within the enterprise and the degree of process change. In the organisational attributes assessment, the items we consider include whether previous changes in the organisation were successful and well-managed and whether adequate resources and funds are available. The results for both assessments can then be plotted onto a two-by-two matrix which will indicate whether the overall change initiative has a low, medium or high-risk rating.

I have found that the real benefit here is the conversation that this process facilitates and not just the result.

Change Impact Register

In this register, we document, for each impact; the current state, the future state, the delta or difference, and our proposed action or intervention to address the impact. Also, you can consider including a rating and a category for each impact and an owner for each action.

I found these registers to be useful living documents that are maintained and updated throughout a change initiative. A summary of the register can also be a useful graphic on a change management dashboard or a status report.

Critical Few Behaviours

One way of describing the impacts of a particular change is the set of critical behaviours that need to be in place for the change to be successfully implemented. You can use this approach in conjunction with the other two approaches i.e. completing them in sequence. Or you can, again depending on the context, go straight to this step. As part of your key messages, you can then inform your stakeholders that here are the four to five key behaviours that we need to focus on for this change to be successful. Specifically, for those impacted by the change, we can assure them that they only have to address these identified few critical behaviours or habits to ensure they are meeting their obligation to this change initiative and the organisation.

In her article Getting to the Critical Few Behaviors That Can Drive Cultural Change Kristy Hull provides some great tips on how to identify and categorise these behaviours. Although she is referring in this article to cultural change, I believe the model applies well to most change initiatives.

In a project environment care should be taken that change impacts are not confused with change requests, which arise throughout a project and are typically presented to a Change Approval board for consideration and approval.

The three approaches outlined above should be performed at the outset of a change initiative. Some change professionals like to map out the stakeholders first and then drill down into the change impacts or it can easily be done the other way around.

I think it is worth your time to develop a change impact approach that works for you. When you give this important step the time and effort it deserves you are setting up your change initiative for success.