Change Management Community of Practice CoP in Oman

Change Management community of Practice is a new initiative has been launched in 2018 in order to increase the importance of Change Management and create a social network agents in Change Management.

When we started the digital transformation project in 2013 in Oman which my organization Ministry of Technology and Communications MTC is leading this national project, we have invest a lot in building capacity of government employees. One of these Building capacities programs was to invest in our ambassadors in change management from different government entities.

We have spent a lot of money in training 60 ambassadors from different government entities. Only 15 was able to pass and get certified in Prosci certificate. After analyzing the ROI, only 3 ambassadors were active and was able to make a change in their entities. Therefore, we decided to change the methodology and have a CM community of practice that has members from different sectors (Government, Private, SMEs, Experts) to exchange the experience and successful stories in their organizations.

Different knowledge methods are shared with this community virtually. One post a week combined with a question for discussion from the moderator of the group to keep the community activities sustainable. It is not an easy job and one of the main challenges as I am the moderator of this group and I have to share one topic a week even if I am on leave. Using a survey as a tool to assess the effectiveness of delivered learning and development after 6 months of launching the community. We provided two virtual platforms for the members in Linkedin and WhatsApp. After the assessment, we couldn’t keep the same interaction in Linkedin and maybe it is not very popular or favorite for most of the members. Therefore, we focused all the communication and knowledge to be delivered to the members in the WhatsApp group. It was very challenging to manage all the members in the whatsapp group but as a moderator has to be strict and diplomatic to manage the discussions and even the type of posts shared by other members. The first year was really challenging but members started to respect the rules of the community.

Members of the community started to take important step to start CM in their organizations which is one of the effective impact of this community. They returned back to the community to discuss with them the best methodologies that they can follow for a successful launch of CM to the top management. Members of the community asked for more of “Sharing stories of CM in digital Transformation projects” and that was the main reason for establishing this community which is to exchange the experience not just the knowledge.

The community started with 55 members in the first year and today more than 100 members is in this community. Members of the community who are finding it effective for them, they invite their colleagues who are interested in CM to join this community.

During the pandemic of COVID-19, the community become very effective as we got a lot of free webinars to share with the community. The level of learning and development has increased very high compared to the time before the pandemic. Therefore, the strategy of managing this community will be changed and more hosting sessions to all the community will be prepared very easily to host CM trainers from different countries around the world.