Organizational Change Management
Organizational Change Management services address human factors - the 'people' aspects of change. Key to stakeholder adoption - and to realizing expected benefits - is making sure positive change actually sticks.
SERVICE OFFERINGS
- Stakeholder Readiness Assessment, Change Strategy
Identifying not only who will be affected by the anticipated change, but how. Developing a change strategy that calls for minimal disruption, while driving maximum stakeholder buy-in and adoption.
- Communication Planning, Message Creation & Delivery
Promoting effective stakeholder communication before, during, and after the time of change. Solidifying the who, what, when and how around stakeholder messaging. For communication to be effective, messages must be clear, concise, and relevant to the reader.
- Awareness Campaigns, Marketing & Advertising
Generating excitement about the change – long before it takes effect. Coming up with creative ways to start to acclimate the organization to the changes afoot. Producing high-quality marketing collateral. Executing upon advertising strategies geared to each target audience.
- Educational Programs, Curriculum Development, Training
Arming stakeholders with the knowledge they need to fully embrace and adopt change. Thoroughly explaining ‘how’ people will work differently can be done through job aids, web-based tools, instructor-led training, and a variety of other methods.
- Adoption Effectiveness Assessment
Quantifying the effectiveness of the executed change strategy. Recording baselines up front, and measuring the degree to which the intended change has occurred. Recalibrating change plans as needed. Implementation of key performance metrics.
- Change Sustainability & Support Plans
Establishing the methods by which change can be sustained. Reinforcement tools and techniques to make sure changes stick.
- And many other Organizational Change Management services that address the people side of change.
CASE STUDIES
A national property & casualty insurance company’s IT organization wanted to seize the purported benefits of the Agile development methodology. Business counterparts were fully on board, as moving to Agile meant faster capabilities delivery, getting products to market faster, and ultimately a quicker ROI. A traditional SDLC shop, moving to Agile represented a big paradigm shift, especially to those IT workers with decades of delivering work the ‘waterfall’ way. Leadership engaged RFC to make the switch to the new working model successful so that the organization could realize its anticipated benefits.
The Stakeholder Readiness Assessment showed that most of the organization perceived the upcoming move to Agile as a good thing, and that there was strong commitment from mid-level management to make it happen. Other findings uncovered that robust company-wide training was the key to full adoption. These ideas informed the Change Strategy, which ultimately called for less-than-expected change resistance management and more-than-expected knowledge building support. A customized Educational Program, modular in nature, enabled IT workers to tailor their own unique learning experience. Emphasis was also placed on shaping business stakeholder behavior, in particular setting the expectations on how the business would interact with IT in the future state model.
Before training official started, RFC launched an Awareness Campaign to generate buzz. Catchy advertising could be seen everywhere, from 6-foot banners in the cafeteria to display ads on TV monitors all throughout the campus.
Ultimately and over time, the change to Agile took hold, and today the teams are getting capabilities out the door faster than ever.