Share your experiences and tips for implementing change

  • 29 October 2021
  • 3 replies
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Userlevel 2

As those of you who know me, I think a lot about Change Management and its implications. Recently, I was on a webinar talking about this and, we published an article on Karbon Magazine called: How to implement change when you don’t know where to start.

Change management is a topic that many people dread, but is so critical to the success and continued growth of your practice.

In our article, we share six key components of a successful change management plan that can help reduce the feelings of being overwhelmed and intimidated (and increase the chance of successful change).

What tips can you share from your own experiences with change management? What did you learn from it (both the hard way, and the easy way)? Are there things about your approach that you would tweak when you next tackle change?

The change you implemented doesn’t have to be huge—that’s not the important part.Really looking forward to reading your change management tips, tricks and experiences.


3 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +19

Hi Peter!

I like many of the points in your article. We are not great at change management at our firm, but we are striving to be better. I came from a large service company that implemented some lean management systems. Many of the items you cover in your article align with lean thinking, specifically:

  • Have a target
  • Know your baseline and check your new results against it
  • Promote staff buy-in

I think we take a different approach in that we are looking for continuous improvement, not short bursts of change. How we do this is we set an impossibly ideal goal (currently: All work done on time and to our standard without any staff working more than 40 hours in the week). We communicate this goal down to the team and ask them to tell us why it’s not possible. They will show us all the things standing in our way to getting to the goal, and we take those things one-by-one, and remove, mitigate, outsource, etc. and then check against our baseline to see if we are closer to our impossible goal (my real goal is to get all work done with no one working more than 32 hours, but that’s a little too out there for our staff)

The hardest part is tracking the change in short intervals. Very often we barge forward based on a feeling of success instead of actual mathematical success.

As a practical example, we are experimenting with Karbon’s time and budget feature to plan our work out to see if it’s even possible to complete all the work with our current staff and processes. It’s been hard to get our staff to think about improving the processes instead of adding more people.

I’m curious how other firms are approaching this.

Userlevel 7
Badge +10

Remember, it’s better to over-communicate and bring your team along on the journey with ongoing updates at each milestone. Ask for feedback so everyone feels heard, even those not directly affected by the change.

 

This was something we learned the hard way, thinking that we did not want to ‘bother’ anyone with the early stages of discovery and ‘why’ we were planning a change was met with concern, fear, and frustration.  When we entertain change is a silo the silo gets blown up.

Now when change is on the horizon, even if we are in the discovery stage we work teasers into All Team meetings, take opportunities to point out situations that may be impacted by the change, we work on the messaging from the beginning.  We will share asynchronous meetings to garner feedback from team members who want a voice.  Whenever possible we test and challenge the change at the leadership level, we don’t expect our team to buy into somethin that we are not confident with.  At significant milestones we will conduct an After Action Review with those who are impacted by the change.

 

Prioritize communication and transparency

Userlevel 2

Thanks for your input Max & Victoria.

As I read both of your posts - It reminded me of something I learned from one of my uncles. He advised me to “Socialise the data.” The idea was to have data publicly visible as we collected it, either when highlighting issues or, the results.

So having a simple spreadsheet that summarised the issues in the business as the team shared them, with some basic scoring would help the wider team understand why we need to make specific changes. This can be as basic as a sheet like this…

 

 

Then, having a simplified way of showing what the results have been from what the current test is…

 

 

Making both publicly visible / accessible on the intranet and in meetings can help the wider team understand the value for them in getting involved in the change. 

Here is a short video (mainly about tracking the issues) that explains where the images above have come from.

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