"Managing The People Aspects Of Change Within Major Projects And Programmes"

Event Report

Our opening event in the 2002-03 series was shared with the Professional Services SIG. It found us at a new venue, the Regus building on Reading's Thames Valley Park, and kindly hosted by Knowledgepool, we were treated to an impressive buffet before the start. Our thanks to David Brain of the Professional Services SIG for the arrangements.

Our talk, by Tim Potter of Innermost Consulting, was attended by over 50 people - an excellent start to the series.

He started with some guiding principles of managing people through change, moving on to talk about the six levers of change, and how these all have to be addressed in any change process:

• Markets & customers
• Products & services
• Organisation
• Processes
• People & culture
• Technology

He then looked at the ways in which individuals respond to change, in terms of the effect on their productivity, self-confidence and morale, quoting Daryl Conner: "You will always pay for change. You can either pay to address it or you can pay for the consequences of not addressing it. But you will pay."

He then covered the importance of building a case for change among stakeholders in the organisation (and sometimes outside it!) as means to reducing the resistance to change which is a constant threat to the success of such programmes. He introduced the concept of mapping stakeholders, pointing out that this was not the same as stakeholder management: you need an action plan (typically covering how often and how to communicate with them) for each group stakeholders, tuned to meet their specific needs.

On the subject of communication, he spoke of the difference between 'conventional' approaches to communication, which peak during a programme during definition and again before implementation, and approaches which stress the benefit of communication increasing steadily over the course of programme delivery. He then covered which types of communication to use - technology-based, paper, and face-to-face formats and the appropriateness of each when addressing stakeholders' awareness, understanding, engagement, involvement, and commitment to the enterprise.

He then covered the kinds of resistance which are likely to occur, and some tips for how to handle these - preferably in advance!

Moving on to leadership, he stressed the importance of being aware of your behaviour as a leader - your teams will be looking to your performance as a guide for theirs. Building of skills in the areas of technology, process, behaviour and management, and for management as well as staff, will repay itself handsomely.

Finally, he introduced a technique termed 'Cumulative impact analysis', which looked at the impact on line functions of multiple change programmes, and the overloading that can occur if programmes proceed without due consideration of others running alongside.