Explore the Levels of Change Management

Tim Talks: Back to the Basics

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Prosci's Tim Talks is a series of 5-minute videos featuring conversations between Tim Creasey, our Chief Innovation Officer, and the people of Prosci. Whether you're building organizational change capability or starting your first project, you will find something helpful in these videos: context for the ADKAR Model and Prosci methodology, trends in change management, answers to your FAQs, and other topics that matter to change practitioners like you.

 


 

We're going back to the basics today, and hopefully giving individuals a better understanding of what makes Prosci so unique. The questions I'm going to be asking are all related to the Prosci methodology.

Can you start off by defining "change management"?

Change management…it's an interesting term. There are a lot of people using a lot of different ways to define it. In the end, it's about preparing, equipping and supporting our people through the changes we're putting them through in the organization. When it's a new technology or a new process, ultimately, people have to change how they do their jobs. Change management is how we help them through those journeys because the better we help them through that journey, the more successful they're going to be, the more successful the project's going to be, and the more successful the organization's going to be.

Can you also describe why change success depends on both the technical side and people side of change?

Successful change really has two components, which we describe as two sides of a coin. There's the technical side and the people side.

The technical side is around designing, developing and delivering a solution that addresses the issue or opportunity we're facing. Sometimes it's a technological solution, but sometimes it's a process or new values or new cultures. The technical side describes the how, the solution and how we're going to be different.

The people side, then, is how we help employees embrace, adopt and use that solution.

So, success depends on both: designing, developing and delivering a technical solution that's also embraced, adopted and used by people, and that's where change management fits in.

How can we measure and demonstrate the success of change management efforts?

Demonstrating the impact of the work we do is always a challenge. And we want to measure whether we helped Andy and Becky and Charlie and Debbie, the individuals that make up the organization. Did we help them through the journey? We measure the effect of our change management activities in terms of how they helped people move forward through that journey. The effectiveness of the communication message is measured through whether or not people would say, "Oh, I understand why this is actually happening." We make our impact through helping people and helping projects deliver outcomes.

Was Becky was happy with the change?

Becky was jazzed, for sure. And the project got better results because we helped Becky through. That's the kicker. It's a win-win-win.

 

2S1A3252.00_01_12_45.Still014Interviewer Delanie is a member of the Prosci growth team 

 

When you describe Prosci's approach, can you explain what you mean by "outcomes desired, actions required"?

The Prosci approach to change management uniquely integrates individual and organizational change management. The ADKAR Model describes the individual’s change journey toward the outcomes desired. It’s how we help each impacted employee through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. That’s what gives us the outcome orientation.

Actions required then describes what the practitioner does. And so, based on the years of research and our aim of providing process orientation, guidance and structure, we give the practitioner the actions required to build their strategy, the plans...that scaled, customized solution that will help impacted employees through A, D, K, A and R. The outcomes we really need to drive successful change.

Last question: What types of change initiatives can Prosci's change management solutions be used on?

Because the Prosci methodology is based on an individual going through change, it's really applicable to all types of organizational change. I remember—this is probably 2007—I went down to one of our Change Management Certification Programs up in the mountains here in Colorado. I got to watch two of the practitioners give their presentations.

The first woman got up and presented an HR diversity strategy being rolled out across a 65,000-person, multinational corporation. She talked about the change characteristics assessment, organizational attributes, sponsorship challenges, and the ADKAR Model and how she's gonna help people move through that.

The next person who presented managed a team of visual communicators at an architectural firm. Her team of eight very creative people takes complex architectural principles and helps people like me understand them. She was trying to bring a little process to how these eight creative people worked, and she talked about how she used the ADKAR Model and the approach.

Because we're starting with the human being and then scaling the activities around it, the ADKAR Model is applicable to lots of different changes. When our change outcomes depend on people changing how they do their jobs, we get better results by helping the people with effective change management.


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Scott McAllister

Scott McAllister

Scott McAllister is a results-oriented leader with a passion for individual and organizational transformation. With experience living on three continents, Scott leads Prosci’s organizational growth by partnering with teams and organizations to help them deliver people-focused, results-driven change. Scott spent more than 15 years helping clients initiate transformational change with a combination of strategy, operational excellence and innovation platforms across a broad range of industries, from healthcare and biotech to financial services and telecom.

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