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The Components of a Change Strategy

As our business has grown over the last decade it is no longer possible to directly perform the change leadership role full-time for clients. Because of this we have instead worked with our clients to develop a detailed change strategy that they can follow and implement for change success with follow-up advisory services to help them stay on the path. Frankly, I took the strategy for granted. I did the work of the strategy development but I’m not sure our clients understood the importance of the change strategy in the context of the overall project.

A recent ADVISORY poll said that 33% of you don’t create a specific change strategy. Perhaps your normal project methodology has some change leadership components built in. However, in our experience the most successful projects are the ones with a focused, specific attention to the organizational change component. Someone needs to be sitting at the project leadership table wearing the change hat. By the way, this usually should not be a Human Resources representative (that is a separate article).

The components of the change strategy, based on our system – Change Project Management – The Next Step. The System for Change Leaders is included below. Are you including all of these components? Let us know if you need help creating your strategy.

The Change Strategy Components.

First, the goal of the change strategy is to develop the project tasks necessary to address the organizational change components of your projects. I think of the change strategy as a separate document that carves out the change view. The connection then is the project level tasks that result from the change activities that translate back into the overall project plan.

Following are the change techniques used to create the strategy:

Stakeholder Analysis – We need to know everything about who we’re dealing with. There are seven steps to the Stakeholder Analysis function and we have 16 specific questions that we apply to each stakeholder. Of course there is a resource allocation in which we assign project resources to the specific stakeholders.

The Change Planning/Monitoring Workshop – This detailed process involves analyzing the complexity of the change, identifying resistance, evaluating the strength of the project team, and assessing the relationship of this change with others occurring within the organization.

Building the Foundation for Change – This is the beginning of the communication process and serves as the basis for communication for the life of the initiative.

Change Breakthrough Analysis – This proprietary process is used throughout the change initiative but is an important exercise for the project leadership and sponsorship teams. We have to start on the same page.

We use all of these tools to create the change strategy that can be managed by the project leadership team. How extensive is your change strategy? Does everyone on your project team understand your change strategy?