Showing the value of change management

When your manager asks you, “What is the value of change management?” how do you respond? Do you talk about communications strategy or do you talk about training schedule? Perhaps, you discuss the need for managing resistance? Or do you talk about project results and organizational success?

“The case for change management is inextricably connected to project and organizational success. If you are not talking about achieving results, then you are having the wrong conversation.”

– Tim Creasey, Prosci Chief Development Officer

For senior and project leaders, the most important issue is the bottom line and to get their attention you must align your thinking, your talking and the work that you do to their thinking, their talking and the work that they do i.e. Results.

Change management is, in the end, a tool for delivering results therefore the four perspectives that you can use for connecting change management to delivering outcomes and results are:

1. The role of the individual. Organizations changes only when the majority of the people working for the organization work differently and affect the change. So, if the individual does not change neither does the organization.
2. The data supporting the value of change management. A growing body of data is available now for studying the effect of change management on projects. A good resource is the Prosci benchmarking rapport that Prosci publish every two years which is a worldwide study of what worked and did not work in the practices of Change Management.

The people side ROI factors

As Prosci practitioner we use three important and very measurable parameters:

• Speed of adoption (how quickly people make the change)
• Ultimate utilization (how many of them make the change)
• Proficiency (how effective they are after making the change)

Cost and Risk of poorly managed changes.

From our experience and data gather over 18 years of research from Prosci we can confirm that not applying a holistic, structured change management approach decreases the probability of projects success 6 fold.