Why a Single Source of Truth is a
Change Management Game Changer
With increasing complexity of change initiatives and the need to coordinate across portfolios, having a Single Source of Truth for Change is essential.
Change managers are busy, busy people
As a change manager, whether you are the sole resource on a project or working with others to deliver change, readying your organization for a change involves:
Orchestrating all of these tasks can be complex work.
Our research has shown that change managers spending typically spend around one third of their time on administrative tasks: inputting and managing data, creating, updating and sharing reports.
A single source of truth for change can halve the time required for administrative tasks, freeing change managers to act more strategically and spend more time with people..
What is a Single Source of Truth for Change?
A single source of truth for change is a digital platform that centralizes and connects your organization’s change management data. You don’t have to shuffle between spreadsheets, PowerPoints, documents, emails and other tools to keep your change projects on course.
It helps you better plan, organize, and manage change management initiatives from start to finish, and assists regardless of the change approach you use (such as proprietary methodologies including Prosci, Kotter, Lewin).
For change teams, a single source of truth for change also acts as a collaboration tool. You can coordinate tasks so everyone knows who's doing what. Plus, get aggregated views of change portfolios and heatmaps so stakeholder change saturation can be carefully monitored and managed.
At a project or initiative level, it gives you a workspace to create your change management plan, making it easy to coordinate impacts on stakeholders, build activitiy plans, track and report on progress and gather feedback about readiness.
At a portfolio level, it gives you the ability to monitor impacts on stakeholder groups across initiatives, automatically aggregating data and reporting at a higher level.
At an enterprise level, a single source of truth gives you the ability to oversee multiple programs & portfolios, manage change teams and store previous change management plans, ensuring these are readily available, creating institutional memory for change.
What are the benefits of a Single Source of Truth for Change?
Speed
It's far quicker to create and manage change management plans
Consistency
One common platform brings uniformity to change management data capture and reporting
Automatic reporting
Creates reports at project, portfolio and enterprise levels
Stakeholder insights
A common stakeholder list ensures that impacts on stakeholders are registered across initiatives
Accessibility & accountability
System is always available and prevents gatekeepers from hoarding information
No more shaky spreadsheets
Removes the need for buggy spreadsheet formulas to link data
Builds change capability
Your change infrastructure shortens the learning curve
Real time reporting
The latest information is always available on impacts (heat maps), progress, readiness and adoption
What does a Single Source of Truth for Change look like?
ChangePlan, our recently launched single source of truth for change is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) web-based platform.
Here are some of its features:
Rolled up views of change initiatives
Organization-wide change timeline & gantt charts
Visual reporting dashboards & leader views
Impacts heatmaps per initiative & aggregated
Time away from ‘business-as-usual’ heatmaps
Stakeholder impacts & activities aggregated across projects
Why is ChangePlan the right single source of truth for change for my organization?
ChangePlan is the only end-to-end organizational change management platform.
It has been built from the ground-up to serve the unique requirements of organizational change managers. It is quick to learn and easy to use.
It is a one-stop-shop for data capture, analysis, building and managing change activities that are easily updateable, gathering readiness feedback, tracking and reporting on progress in real-time.
ChangePlan is designed to work along with all change management methodologies, and can be configured to suit your organization's approach. It is not tied to any consulting services or bundled along with time consuming training certifications.
How will you use the additional time your single source of truth for change makes available?
The final question that you need to ask yourself is how you'll make the most of the free time you have. Might you work with your leaders, preparing and supporting them to be better change leaders?
Will you look for additional opportunities to involve and excite employees about the changes to come? Will you help the business prioritise and sequence change initiatives to improve uptake? Or concentrate on minimizing change fatigue and risk?
The luxury of time gives us space to learn, create and innovate.
