by Tim CreaseyMany organizations struggle to demonstrate measurable progress on their efforts to build change capabilities. To help you meet this challenge, Prosci developed the Change Management Maturity Model Audit, a robust assessment based on five capability areas—five unique sets of detailed, observable and measurable organizational change management attributes. Evaluating these helps you uncover your overall organizational change management competency and the precise progress you have made in each area. More importantly, the findings fuel critical discussions with leaders about how to build a targeted approach to maturing in change management as an organization.
This area focuses on the specific leadership activities necessary for building organizational change management competencies. How committed is leadership to organizational change management? What activities or messages does leadership undertake to communicate the value of change management and the effort to build an internal competency? Who is sponsoring change management deployment? If your organization is less capable in this area, it's the area you should focus on first.
Key elements of leadership capability:
This capability area enables you to assess how people use change management processes and tools on projects and initiatives within your organization. What percentage of projects are leveraging change management? Are adequate people and funding available to apply change management to projects and initiatives across the organization?
Key issues to assess include:
Change management is ultimately accomplished by employees, supervisors, managers, leaders, project teams and practitioners throughout the organization. The third capability area, competencies, looks at the training and development of these key groups of people who must apply change management tools and principles. Who in the organization has been trained? Have they demonstrated change management capability?
To understand the competency area, you must understand the extent to which your organization has:
The standardization capability area looks at the mechanisms and systems used to institutionalize change management. Is every part of your organization using one consistent change management approach? Have you integrated change management with project management? Have you included change management in other improvement approaches? Standardization is the capability area that enables effective change management to become a fixed component of how the organization introduces change.
Crucial elements of standardization to assess include:
networksThe fifth and final capability area, socialization, focuses on creating buy-in and commitment for change management. Effectively building capabilities and competencies requires this from every level of an organization. Does the organization view change management as a competitive differentiator and core competency? Is reinforcement in place to sustain change management at every level of the organization?
Look for the following components of socialization:
Understanding where you stand on the five capability areas is only the beginning. The Prosci Change Management Maturity Model Audit enables you to score incremental progress on dozens of attributes. In addition to leveraging the research-based rubric, you can conduct multiple assessments across divisions, analyze gaps and even benchmark your progress against the hundreds of organizations that have completed the audit. Instead of relying on educated guesses, precise data informs your team, your leadership and your quest for organizational change management maturity.
Tim Creasey is Prosci’s Chief Innovation Officer and a globally recognized leader in change management. His work forms the foundation of the largest body of knowledge in the world on managing the people side of change to deliver organizational results.
