Explore the Levels of Change Management

2 Questions You’ll Hear After You Put Change Management in Context

Prosci

2 Mins

PROSCI ARCHIVES
tips-and-how-to_s-listing.jpg

Have you read our tutorial on the five questions to ask to put change management in context? If you’ve run through this list of questions with a senior executive or project leader, they will see that many of the benefits they hoped to get from their project are very dependent on adoption and usage.

And then they should have two new and wonderful questions for you:

  • What is the adoption and usage for my change?
  • How do we increase adoption and usage? 

What Is Adoption and Usage for My Change?

This question is the perfect way to engage your audience in a conversation about impacted groups. Ask these three questions:

  • Who has to adopt and use the change?
  • What does adoption and usage mean for each of those audiences in the context of this project?
  • How will we know if they have adopted and are using the new solution?

In different words, who will have to do their jobs differently? How will they have to do their jobs differently? For example, if you are creating a new website, clients will need to be redirected from the old website to the new one, and employees will need to know where to go to get the information they need to do their job. And how will you measure if they are indeed adopting and using?

Once you’ve begun talking about what the people side of the project looks like—that is, the adoption and usage side of the project—your discussion will naturally turn to another question:

So How Do We Increase Adoption and Usage?

The short answer is, of course, change management. But now you can begin talking about change management in its context, when your audience is eager and ready to hear what you have to say.

You can talk about the Prosci ADKAR Model as a way to understand and manage individual transitions; the impacted groups are collections of individuals, after all. You can talk about the 3-phase Process for organizational change that integrates with the project process and includes specific, scalable deliverables to influence higher adoption and usage. You can talk about the best practices of change management or the top seven contributors of success. Here are some examples:

  • When senior leaders are active and visible participants throughout the project, we can increase employee adoption and usage.
  • When we communicate directly, frequently and from preferred senders, we can increase employee adoption and usage.
  • When we apply a structured change management approach and assign the right resources to managing the changes of this project, we increase employee adoption and usage.
  • When managers and supervisors support their employees through the change process, we can increase employee adoption and usage.
  • When employees are engaged in the process and feel involved and valued, we can increase employee adoption and usage.
  • When resistance is proactively identified and effectively managed, we can increase employee adoption and usage.

When you ask the right five questions, you’re likely to get these two questions back. When you do, you’ll be ready to have an engaging conversation about change management activities and resources.

Learn more about how to change the conversation you have on change management:

Five Levels of Change Management Maturity article

 

 

Prosci

Prosci

Founded in 1994, Prosci is a global leader in change management. We enable organizations around the world to achieve change outcomes and grow change capability through change management solutions based on holistic, research-based, easy-to-use tools, methodologies and services.

See all posts from Prosci