As we continue looking at the new offering from Matae: Change Workspace, the question occurred to me, why do people use tools?
We use tools for various reasons, and our motivations can differ based on the context and the specific type of tool. In change management, we want somewhere to park lots of detailed information that we learn from our stakeholders, we want to organise various activities, timelines and changes and most of all, we want to understand the people involved: who they are, how they fit together and what we need to do to support them.
When we consider the outcomes we want from a tool, we want it to be more efficient and productive than not using the tool, we want accuracy and more precision than we could achieve plotting out our plans in a simple spreadsheet, we want our complex processes to produce consistent outputs.
When we're working on change within the constraints of a tool, we still want to spark creativity and enable innovation, we want to be able to scale up and down to suit the initiative, we want a degree of standardisation that makes it easy to learn, and naturally we want the automation of our repetitive tasks and calculations.
The choice of tool is going to depend on the specific context, individual preferences, and the task at hand. Matae Change Workspace may not be quite as easy to wield as your customised spreadsheet. But your spreadsheet is not going to give you a portfolio view of change across the organisation, either.
This week we're delving into the mechanics of setting up the portfolio view of change.
Participate in our interactive review of Matae's Change Management Tool
This will be an interactive review in which everyone in the Agencia Change community can participate. As an Agencia client, member or subscriber, you will be able to follow along in your own free trial version of the tool.
Sign up to trial Matae Change Workspace
Nothing beats experience, so follow along with this review by signing up for the early access trial from this link: https://www.changeworkspace.io/try-for-free-agencia-change
This is a full a trial version of the web-based Change Workspace platform. Matae has provided this so the Agencia Change community can enjoy the review and follow along by checking out the same features we'll be discussing in the blog - directly in the Change Workspace Tool.
The trial version is limited only in duration, so you can experiment to your heart's content. At the commencement of your trial period, you will be sent an email with your log in credentials. No payment or credit card details will be required to participate and there will be no obligation to continue using Change Workspace following the conclusion of the interactive trial. The team will provide you with their data policy (all on-shore in Australia) and privacy policy upon request. There's an inbuilt support button in the tool you can use for this purpose.
Don't worry if you're coming to this review late, if the link is still operable, you can still review the tool for a 4-week trial period. So please follow along as we review this brand new change management tool: Matae Change Workspace.
Week 2: Identify who will be Impacted and Build your Change Impacts Analysis
Identify who will be impacted
The first thing I needed to get my head around was who were the various groups, views and references to people in Change Workspace. There are two areas where you'll manage your people: firstly in Stakeholders in the body of the tool, and secondly in People in the top right hand corner alongside the Admin menu.
The Stakeholders area is for people who are not impacted by change but who are working in it: Project Team, Sponsor and Stakeholder Groups. The People menu is for organising your people data into Employees, Departments, and Impacted Groups.
It's important to know that at the moment we're just setting up people data, there are no impacts yet!
There are a number of ways you can go with data in Change Workspace. You'll have the option to upload people data by CSV or enter people directly. If you're just playing around with the tool for a trial, you can use Personas as placeholders for impacted people.
If you're going to be using Change Workspace in your organisation, you can have it connected to organisational data providing another level of depth over the long term. You'll see from the sample project that Impacted Groups are visible to your current project. This is a potential time-saver for in-house change teams. But it's important to know that this particular group is not editable between projects - so for example an Impacted Group called Executive Assistants will be comprised of the same people across all projects.
This is where playing around with Personas may be of interest. Use of Personas is optional. They can be assigned to an Impacted Group or sit on their own. If you've populated an Impacted Group with real people, you can also assign these real people a Persona. Personas provide a tag that might be useful for reporting and monitoring over time. Personas are project-specific, so if you create a Persona 'Change Champion', for example, these don't have to be the same people in every project.
How a Change Management tool handles the People is a top consideration
So, as Impacted Groups are at a universal level across the tool, Stakeholder Groups, Project Team and Sponsors are at a project level. Impacted Groups can be filled with Impacted Employees and their Leaders. These are people who are directly impacted by the Changes we captured last week in that they will need to perform work differently in the future state.
Matae has expressed interest in improving Change Workspace to meet demand. And a point of feedback under consideration for Matae is how the people management works for most users. Drop your thoughts in the comments below if you have an opinion one way or the other - do all the People fit better in one menu, or do you find it usable to be split into Stakeholders (for project-based resources) and People (for data management and global populations) as it currently is?
While identifying who was going to be impacted by my Changes, I liked the experience using Change Workspace. Although not understanding the people hierarchy at first, the interface gave a feeling of confidence, that if I persist with learning, I'll find the logic has been well thought through and will be presented back to me in useful views. Learning a new change management tool takes time but on balance, I think the people hierarchy could be represented more clearly. I'd be interested to see your comments.
I also liked the prompt to consider whether the impacts on people within a group are identical to each other. It's a good concept to be having clarity about, as it will naturally drive the activities and content required down the track. When adding Leaders to Impacted Groups, I was able to search by name or job title which I liked. But then I had a moment of true love, when I added team members to the Project Team (in the Stakeholders menu). This was super fast and super easy.
Build Your Change Impacts Analysis
When first accessing impacts, you'll be asked what kinds of impact categories you want to have in your Changes. Each is provided with a definition to ensure everyone who encounters them understands the same thing by the category. I found this particularly useful when individuals need to decide whether an impact is more of a process impact, a policy impact or a way of working impact. There are some typo errors in the definitions of this section, which I've fed back on, and these don't really interrupt trialling the impacts functions. In any case, you can configure Categories in the Admin menu and set your own preferred definitions.
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Given my view that impacts are the core of change management, I think I would have liked this part of the tool to operate a little more fluidly and with more calculation. I'm getting a 'cart before the horse' feeling trying to define impacts while knowing I've already entered some information about Changes that would be useful to me if it could be pulled through to my current process and presented back within subsequent processes.
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An example of this is each Change has a start and end date. When asked to consider the go-live date of a Change for an Impacted Group, it would be great to be reminded of the start and end date I'd already defined for the Change, so I know I'll be entering a sensible go live date for my Impacted Group in relation to that Change. This experience of wanting more data pulled through into the current process seems to be a persistent feeling for me while using features that could be referenced or calculated.
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Something I really liked after I'd entered impacts occurred when using the Change Deployment Plan. I'd already encoded a dependency and the Matae system reminded me that dependencies need to happen sequentially. So often Change Managers are under pressure to deliver dependent initiatives concurrently!
I believe the tool will help enforce a discipline for change managers to think about exactly how they will find the capacity or resources to do this, rather than simply over-scheduling themselves - or the change audience - in response to pressure on timelines. This helps make the case for an organised, project managed approach to change delivery.
I mentioned last week that I had already found the impacts filters, and these work well. Under the reports menu at the top of the screen, you will find your Change Impacts Heatmap. All your hard work of defining the Changes, identifying who is impacted and adding information about impacts and categories has now paid off. Your Change Impacts Heatmap has the capability to filter across audience groups, impacts categories, severity and probability.
Week 2 Goals: Achieved
At the end of the week 2 trial, you should be able to achieve a Change Impacts Heatmap and a Portfolio Go-Live Timeline, both in the Reporting menu.
But here's where you can truly geek out. In the Reporting menu you'll also find the Impacts Portfolio Level List. In this report you can apply filters across your entire change portfolio to all the impacts with commonalities limited only by your will to filter! So if you want to drill down on a particular impacted group, say Frontline employees, and find out all their capability-related impacts, this is where you'd do it.
Terminology Update
Before we sign off the review this week, I want to update you as promised. Last week I mentioned that where it came to date labels for the start date and finish date of changes, we had some differences in terminology to work through. Matae has implemented improvements that have resolved this labelling issue. For each Change, you'll be asked for a Deployment Start Date and and Deployment Complete Date, and as I discovered to my joy, the tool insists that the Deployment Start Date follows after the last dependency.
Stay tuned as we continue our series reviewing the Matae Change Workspace tool, and look out for articles from our guest blogger Matt Dragun, Matae Founder. https://www.agenciachange.com/news
Remember, this will be an interactive review, so feel free to drop us a comment, and to participate and try out the features for yourself, download your trial version here: