Faster delivery models, new technology and rapidly changing conditions require today’s businesses to operate in a state of constant change.<\/p>\n
Forbes magazine<\/a> notes that in April 2020, Microsoft’s CEO said, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” Organizations must build change resilience to keep up with this new normal while avoiding employee confusion.<\/strong><\/p>\n In this blog, we’ll explore a few important yet often-overlooked organizational change management<\/a> (OCM) components you need to have in place to thrive through transformation, along with examples of how they work in action.<\/p>\n You can break transformation projects into multiple sprints and span over weeks, months and sometimes years. Change takes time, while new technologies and disruptions are emerging at a faster and faster pace. In today’s world, frequent business transformations<\/a> are essential, so how can we make them easier without causing fatigue? Developing a change story offers a way to help mitigate negative reactions to change by preparing stakeholders for the long haul.<\/p>\n At the macro level, your change story<\/a> answers what is changing and why.<\/strong> In addition, this story should speak to who it impacts (stakeholders) and how and when the change will occur (change journey). Your change story also serves as the basis for your elevator speech, and you should develop it with active engagement and input from the Scrum master and leadership.<\/p>\n Example: A large consumer products company wanted to expand its products to customers. The transformational effort consisted of several projects tied to multiple acquisitions. They developed a change story that:<\/em><\/p>\n Sharing your change story to all impacted stakeholder groups built employee resilience for the transition throughout the multi-year program to successfully implement your business’ desired results.<\/p>\n User stories typically describe a user\u2019s role, associated actions and the value they deliver\u00a0at the individual stakeholder level in simple language. This helps ensure your team understands the business’s sought value and how it wants to operate.<\/strong> This approach allows your team to walk in the stakeholder’s shoes within a particular business scenario.<\/p>\n From an OCM perspective, user stories help complete a change impact assessment. This detailed assessment maps out a description of each key change, degree of change, enablers and barriers to change and other important points for every role affected. A change impact assessment is critical to get to “what’s in it for me” (WIIFM) messaging. The assessment (along with user stories) then drives the development of stakeholder specific engagement strategy.<\/p>\n An article on change management<\/a> by the Forbes Coaches Council notes, \u201cleaders often minimize the change or, more specifically, the impact of the change on engagement and productivity. Leaders have had much more time with the change and have rationalized the impact of the change for themselves.\u201d A change impact assessment (along with user stories) can help you avoid overlooking the effects of transformation on your employees day-to-day and drive the development of a stakeholder-specific engagement strategy.<\/p>\n Example: A leading insurance organization understood what a new regulatory change meant for their policies but needed to understand what the change meant to the thousands of agents across the country. They conducted a change impact assessment based on the user stories and grouped agents into tiers:<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n Collecting user stories and allowing them to guide this approach resulted in over 95 percent of agents surveyed agreeing they had the support they needed to handle the regulatory change.<\/p>\n With multiple deployments and milestones throughout a transformation, it is common for organizations to experience tunnel vision, only focusing on and talking about the looming transformation. As important as it is to communicate what will change within the organization, it is equally important to reinforce what won’t.<\/p>\n Things that are not changing, such as day-to-day activities, organizational structure, purpose and mission, company policies or informal networks, can become anchors that stabilize and center your employees<\/strong>. These anchors help to reduce the stress and anxiety that comes with multiple changes.<\/p>\n Example: A commercial real estate technology consulting firm decided to transform its operating model. They wanted to shift from a siloed, product-focused organization to a functionally based, globally centralized services organization.<\/em><\/p>\n1. Create a change story that builds a compelling need for change.<\/h2>\n
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2. Leverage user stories to build an understanding of stakeholder impacts.<\/h2>\n
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3. Focus not only on what is changing but also on what is staying the same.<\/h2>\n
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