You’ve no doubt heard the phrase, “Change on a page” for when you are pulling together your change plans and various other things.
But how have you handled trying to get your change sorted in a day?
This might sound crazy but when you come into a large program of work that has been delivering many things with little or no change management, you have a lot of catching up to do. Then you find yourself in the midst of numerous deliverables/initiatives about to take flight and you need to be nimble, quick, and damn good at getting your head (and arms) around the octopus before it gets (further) away from you!
So how do you do the 27 (made up number) things that you would normally do during project discovery, initiation and development and do it in a day (or two)?
If we attempted to just get a list of the stakeholders it could take the whole day.
What about getting the current and future state of what is changing? Several days at best!
Hang on there, I thought we were looking at how we can get this done quickly?
What if you got some of the key project/program people together for an hour (more if you can get it) and run through something like the Strategic Change Canvas (part of the Lean Change offering by IdeaLeap and Lean Change)? Then follow this up with some short sessions with some of the stakeholders/end-users?
This would certainly give you (and those in the meeting with you) a massive insight into what is currently happening in the program and how it is looking.
It will also very quickly give you an idea of the gaps in the project/program when the team are not able to complete any of the areas on the canvas.
I am not saying this is possible or impossible but I am saying we need to bust the mould of how we gather the information we need to make some kind of impact with change!
I’ve certainly had my fair share of situations where project team members attempt to discourage me from meeting with end users and other stakeholder groups.
This is generally where I will put my energy in a tight timeframe because people further up the chain have a tendency to give the view that everything is fine and people will just adopt whatever we throw at them! NO THEY WON’T!
People in positions of (hierarchy) power also perceive they have a degree of authority but more often than not they have forgotten what it means to be on the front line trying to deliver something and being roadblocked by decisions made by people who have done NO consultation. Yes I am making some gross generalisations here but it is more the case of what I have experienced as opposed to the alternative. This also extends to some project team members that think they know what Change Management is and push you out or block you from doing your job. We are there to help everyone do what they need to do in a better, and more cohesive, way across the program and all the stakeholders. It’s interesting when you share a snippet of Change Management, whether it be a roadmap, an overlay, or even a template for impacts, that somehow team members are suddenly experts in the art and science of Change! If only it were that easy.
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