Large organizations with significant change activity have teams of Change Managers whose daily roles involve reaching out to individuals to conduct their change activities, such as stakeholder analysis, readiness assessments, and impact interviews.
The problem: stakeholders get too many requests from Change Managers
With increasingly large volumes of change work underway within organizations, Change Managers working on separate initiatives often find themselves needing to access people within the same business areas & audience groups. This can lead to a multitude of requests for information, meetings, and activities that can quickly overwhelm busy leaders, stakeholders & audience groups. How about setting up a ‘change front door’?
The solution: the Change ‘Front Door’ process
Organizations can solve the change request saturation problem by setting up a front door process to manage requests to contact stakeholders, business areas and audience groups.
How it works
- A Front Door representative is assigned to business areas that receive significant numbers of change requests
- This representative may be a PMO or Change Manager within that business area
- When a Change Manager wants to approach stakeholders within that business area, they must submit a request to the representative
Advantages
Because Front Door representatives have visibility into all change requests that come through across multiple initiatives, they can monitor the changes impacting their teams. Key benefits include:
- change collision risks mitigated
- lower likelihood of change fatigue among key stakeholders
- sped up interactions by providing Change Managers with a clear point of contact within business areas
- better accountability, with a documented trail of approvals for contacting each group
Two ways to set up a process
1. Manual process
- Create a standard form or spreadsheet to collect basic information about the change, such as a description, list of potential impacts, estimated stakeholders count and other details
- Ensure each business area has a Front Door representative to vet requests
- Design a communication process to assist Change Managers who need to interact with these representatives
- When the representative receives a request, they should contact the Change Manager for an initial discussion
- The representative can then allow or deny approval for the Change Manager to make contact with individuals within their area
- If approved, the representative can assist the Change Manager in approaching the right individuals, and they may also provide assistance with the Change approach
2. Automated process
ChangePlan automates and simplifies the Front Door process within organizations. Its single stakeholder list maps your organizational chart and lists these representatives for each audience group, making it easy for Change Managers to identify the right person to contact.
From within ChangePlan’s initiative workspace Change managers can reach out to the Front Door representative with a click. Change Managers can also access to notes, instructions and documents that Front Door representatives wish to provide, such as playbooks for interacting with that particular audience.
The Front Door representative can monitor requests within their dedicated Front Door dashboard (pictured below), overseeing all activity affecting their business group.
Summary
If key stakeholders within your organization are experiencing overwhelming numbers of requests from Change Managers, consider setting up this process to help manage the change cadence for business areas facing significant change. This video explains the role of Change Management.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic and how ChangePlan automates this crucial process for change teams, book a time to meet with us.
