A pre-requisite for any successful project requiring organisational change, is an assessment of the state of readiness for change of all of the stakeholders.  

If you are to design a robust change management programme, at the outset of the project you need an understanding of the degree of readiness for the change envisaged by the managers, staff and other key stakeholders.

Only when you understand the level of commitment of these stakeholders are you able to tailor your communications and approach to change management appropriately. It is not necessary that all stakeholders are bought-in to the same level, but what is important, is assessing their commitment against the level of buy-in that is deemed appropriate for the project to be successful.

At the start of any project we recommend that the project team uses a brainstorming session to firstly identify all the relevant stakeholders.

They next agree on the level of commitment required for the success of the project being initiated.  We frequently find that stakeholder groups are not always “logical” – note in the download example there is a mix of management, departmental staff and unions, each requiring a different degree of buy-in.  

Having identified who the stakeholders are we then set about making an assessment of their readiness for change. This can be by interview, or, in more advanced organisations, through the use of a self-completed questionnaire sent to selected stakeholders.  

ValueAdding.com uses a simple scorecard to review commitment at the start of a project and form the basis for a communications and change management strategy.  The objective of this strategy is to ensure that stakeholders are moved towards their target level of commitment.

We then advocate the integration of the milestone project plan with the existing communications channels to give an overview of the timing for key messages regarding the project.  Once this skeleton is developed then the delivery of messages and timing of change management events can be woven into the overall project plan.  The intention is to avoid missing key publication dates of existing newsletters, bulletins or briefings and to ensure that the project has every chance of success.

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