Free Clip from Change Management: Evaluating Impact and Organizational Readiness - Assessing the Change Impact

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This course was published via Pluralsight.

Your seventh process is assessing the change impact. The purpose of this process is to analyze how stakeholders will be impacted by the change and the change's specific impact on people, processes, tools, organizational structures, roles, and technology. As you are well aware by now, large changes are never as simple as they seem on the surface.

I like to think of any large change as an iceberg. Take, for example, a strategic decision to switch on a new software tool. On the surface, the organization has to install the new tool and provide some training. But below the surface, the organization has to uninstall the old tool, assign user permissions, update process documentation, write knowledgebase articles, modify the automated phone system for the help desk, update the new workstation images, review contracts and licensing agreements, and so on and so on.

This process involves identifying and categorizing who and what will be affected, assessing the degree of change occurring within these areas, and describing the change.

Here are the commonly accepted inputs for this process. The change definition, vision statement, and stakeholder analysis are outputs from processes I covered in previous modules. I promised you that prework would pay off, and here it is. This process will yield a change impact assessment, which is one of the most critical outputs of all the processes. I'm going to demonstrate how to complete one in the next clip, but first I want to tell you why you need it.

The change impact assessment determines the size, scope, timing, and complexity of the change effort. Take a moment to look over that list. Those are some of the most important pieces of information you and your organization are going to need when it comes to any change. It's also why this process is in the middle and not at the end of your list. The change impact assessment will be either a direct input or indirect input for at least five other processes.

It is used to inform and guide the formation of the change strategy and identify activities required to manage risk and resistance that may be associated with the change. In the next clip, I'm going to demonstrate how to complete a change impact assessment.

The change impact assessment provides a way to estimate how much change management effort and how many change management resources you will need. All of the files and examples you see in this clip are available for you to download in the exercise files for this course.

Here's the blank assessment form with 10 factors to consider. Use the process inputs I discussed in the previous clip to help you determine the appropriate severity level for each factor. As you start filling in the values, you'll see the score at the bottom automatically update. When you are finished, if the score is 16 or lower, it will remain green. This indicates a minimal change and will require a small amount of change management effort and resources. A score between 17 and 23 will turn yellow and indicate a medium change, which will require more change management effort and resources. A score of 24 or more will turn red and indicate a large and complex change, which will require a significant amount of change management effort and resources. Obviously, what's considered significant by one organization could be considered small by a different organization.

Your final score will help you formulate a change strategy, which I'll cover how to do in the next course in this learning path. This course is all about evaluating impact and organizational readiness. With the impact portion complete, we can now move on to evaluating organizational readiness.

This course was published via Pluralsight.