An Introduction to Change Risks and Barriers
The majority of effort expended on Change Management during the course of a project, is spent in identifying potential issues that may slow down adoption of the solution or cause the project to be terminated. How can you find and mitigate these risks?
Start by narrowing the field
To keep your project progressing to its timetable, it is necessary to identify potential issues before they arise. However, it’s not realistic or efficient to manage every possible issue that may or may not present itself on a project.
The most efficient way to identify the areas to focus on, is to identify which risks are most likely to become issues and which will have the most impact. In this sense, managing change is much like managing any other aspect of a project – regular assessment of your risks will identify where you should focus your work moving forwards.
Using risk to drive Change Management in this way will give you:
Awareness of where effort should be concentrated and where it shouldn’t
Awareness of what could go wrong and what needs to be done to mitigate
Awareness and understanding of changing risks throughout the project
Flexibility to react to changes in people and priorities over the lifecycle of the project
Don’t reinvent the wheel
All change programmes have the potential for risk in the same areas. This means it is possible (and preferable) to use a pre-determined set of change risks to track and manage.
Measuring the same set of risks throughout the lifecycle of the project will give you a good way to:
track your risks over time
report and escalate risks
identify focus areas
compare risk levels between differing stakeholder groups
The usual suspects
Different projects may have specific areas of risks that you want to track, but the majority of projects have the potential for issues in the following areas:
Awareness - Are Adaptors aware of the project and how the outcome of the project will impact them and their role?
Engagement - Are stakeholders engaged and actively taking part in the project?
Capacity - Do Adaptors have the time and energy to absorb the changes the project will make to their way of working?
History - How have previous projects affected stakeholders’ attitudes to change?
Agility - Are there suitable change frameworks in place? (Examples of change frameworks are training facilities or ways of communicating to stakeholders)
Capability - Do key Adaptors have the skills needed to perform their roles in the required way?
Sponsorship - Are the project sponsors engaged and actively championing the project?
Resistance – Are there aspects of the solution that may be seen as detrimental to some or all of the Adaptors? (Some examples of this might be if the project will result in a reduction in headcount or reduced levels of influence for one or more Adaptors)
Very few projects have significant risks in all of these areas. However, all projects will have risks in some of these areas. The key to managing change is to identify the specific risk profile for your project and focus attention and work on the areas with the most significant risks.