When I was invited to write a guest blog for Agencia Change, the first question that popped into my mind was what would be of interest to the audience.
I spent some time pondering the different topics I could start with.
Fortunately, my role affords me the privilege of speaking with many people working in change management and transformation across various industries worldwide on a daily basis.
I'm consistently inspired by the passion and dedication they bring to their work. Yet, I'm also reminded of the universal challenges they face. Despite our diverse contexts, we often find ourselves battling similar obstacles. It's like fighting the same battle on different fronts.
Reflecting on these conversations, I've decided to share the most common challenges that I hear from our clients and prospects.
1. Single View of Change
The Single view of change seems like the elusive holy grail for change practitioners. The idea of a single, comprehensive view of change initiatives impacting different audience groups at any given time is at the top of the wish-list. What is a seemingly simple concept, is currently out-of-reach for most.
There are several factors that are standing in the road, including change being implemented by different groups and projects, with nuances in approach and disconnected data sets.
2. Measuring Change Management Value
Quantifying the value and impact of change management efforts remains a persistent challenge for most organisations. Many Change Managers find it difficult to identify the tangible metrics that directly link to business outcomes and when they can, access to tools and data for the purpose of measurement is a major barrier.
Traditionally most change management measures are qualitative e.g. survey data and with any qual data often open . While some new quantitative measures have become available e.g. software feature utilisation/adoption, often these are limited.
3. Executive Engagement
Securing buy-in and active participation from senior leadership is critical for the success of any change initiative. However, many change managers struggle to engage and maintain the commitment of senior management throughout their projects.
I believe this issue is tightly linked to the challenges associated with Measuring Change Management Value. Having more sophisticated metrics that are closely aligned to the C-suite drivers of managing risk and maximising return would no doubt help elevate change conversations.
4. Process Efficiency
To say Change Managers, are massive users of “manual” tools like Spread Sheets and Power Point Presentations is stating the obvious. We also rely on a bunch of disconnected applications, think Outlook, Survey Monkey, Slack, Intranet, Yammer, LMS, the list goes on!
I truly believe that AI represents a great opportunity for Change Managers to reduce some of the content creation and data analysis manual load that we currently carry through tools like Microsoft Co-pilot, but this is only part of the efficiency picture.
The real gains from AI can only be unlocked through cross-platform access to data that will enable (and super charge) predictive change management – stay tuned for my next guest blog post!
Change Challenges are Universal
I hope this resonates with you – know you’re not alone in the change universe!
Matt Dragun is the Founder and Managing Director of Matae. Matae provides software that helps organisations accelerate the adoption of new technologies and ways of working. Matae and Agencia Change are providing the Agencia Change community with an interactive product review of Matae’s new web-based offering, Change Workspace.
To participate in the interactive review, sign up for your free 4-week trial using this link: https://www.changeworkspace.io/try-for-free-agencia-change and follow along with our articles in the Agencia Change blog.
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