CASE STUDIES

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Read our detailed Case Studies

Here are just three examples of the work we have recently completed for our clients. Get in touch if we can help your organisation lead and land better change.

01

Home Care Provider delivers better outcomes through a focus on the people side of change

Situation

As part of our client’s transformation to a customer driven culture, a key change project was identified to improve the way they interacted with their customers. This involved implementing a complete Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, with the aim to:

  • have a complete view of the customer journey from enquiry to discharge
  • enable industry leadership in consumer directed care
  • provide technology to enable customer centricity.

This was not “just a technology change” as it also had customer, legislative, business, organisational and cultural change aspects. There was acknowledgement that the bigger picture needed to be articulated and understood, so sponsors and managers could successfully lead their teams through the change.

Approach

  • We initially delivered a series of one day intensive change management training sessions for all leaders and managers.
  • Working with the Change Leader and her team, we then assessed the change to:
    • provide a baseline from which to measure ROI
    • provide key messages for consistent communication
    • deliver insights for tailored training and
    • provide support for leaders and managers to lead their teams through the change.
  • Throughout the life of the change, we revisited these assessments to:
    • ensure sponsorship, change management and project management were tracking well
    • show how anticipating and managing resistance reduces project risk
    • help understand how to tailor the change approach for groups and individuals
    • understand and deliver the support sponsors and managers needed to successfully sponsor and lead the change
    • communicate current to future state for each of the impacted roles, so managers and teams understood how their world was changing and WIIFM (what’s in it for me) to choose to support and participate in the change.

Change management support and guidance was provided at key points of the project, from the initial audit, through the pilot and full implementations, to reinforcing the change.

Results/Outcomes

By successfully applying change management to the project and delivering higher levels of adoption and usage, an appetite for change management was built within the business, particularly at the executive and manager levels.

Change management is now a part of every project. A dedicated Change Team provides the resourcing to ensure that change capability continues to be built and that faster adoption, greater utilisation and higher proficiency are achieved on the changes impacting the organisation’s employees.

Change in Practice Case Study - Home care
Change in Practice Case Study - Government
02

Local Government sees a return on their investment in managing change

The Situation

Our client was planning to undertake major change projects, including relocating 50% of staff members to a new office, bringing teams from three existing sites into one office. This move was also dependant on implementing activity-based working and their Digital Transformation Program of work, impacting all 900 staff, including those in the field, and members of the community across a large geographic area.

Other factors at play included a history of poorly delivered change, a unionised workforce, the impact of change on the community and the politically sensitive nature of the change underway.

The council sort strategic advice on identifying the core change management issues and where to start in addressing them to make sure they achieved the benefits of the change agenda for the organisation, their people and community.

Action

Through a series of planning sessions, Executive sessions and review, we worked with the council to design the program of work to build long-term change capabilities within the organisation, rather than just address spot-fires. This included our support with training and strategic change consulting as:

  • They planned to land a higher proportion of their change initiatives by developing an enterprise wide change management strategy that clearly aligned with the organisations strategic plan. This focused on lifting the adoption rates of each initiative and ensuring the supporting structures were in place.
  • They stood-up a Change Management Office (CMO) and invested in change management training and consulting support for the change team. They reviewed resources needed for key initiatives, based on several factors including scale, timeframe, readiness levels, risk and brand impact.
  • Senior leaders/sponsors and other people leaders were orientated to the importance of their role as leading and landing change and were equipped with the tools they needed
  • Engaged us to provide regular strategic change consulting to support them on deploying the strategy
  • Most importantly, they took all the above and proceeded to build change muscle by using the new organise wide skills on key projects and further develop their capability at an individual and organisational level.

Results/Outcomes

They now have 12 change managers (up from 2) across the business with 4 sitting within the CMO applying change management to the councils change projects. All people leaders, from the Executive team to frontline managers in the organisation have been trained on how to lead their people to land successful change initiatives and are applying the tools. They also have access to the change managers for advice.

During the COVID-19 pandemic their investment in and commitment to change capability came to the fore. The organisation, due to effective change leadership was able to pivot quickly, settle all their people into the new environment and continued with the projects underway. Not only that they were able to leverage the conditions to accelerate progress on their digital and activity based working projects. This meant that post COVID they are further advanced with their projects than anticipated.

03

Utilities company delivers better outcomes through effective change sponsorship

Situation

Our client was mid-way through a 5-year program of work aimed at bringing innovative solutions to their sector that reduced costs to the consumer, maintaining high quality of service and product and moving to a self-sustaining business in the light of reduced financial input from partners and the parent organisation.

The organisation drew on its deep engineering expertise to plan and lead the major initiatives and, while the ‘technical’ side of these change was tracking really well, the adoption of the new products, systems and ways of working by its people was very low. This meant deadlines were extended, benefits were partially achieved and performance to the 5-year plan was below expected.

The organisation wanted to explore how change management could fit alongside its current project management approach and how it would help raise adoption and usage to improve performance.

Action

Through a series of planning sessions with 2 Directors and the Head of Change, we quickly learned about some of the elements in their current mix that were helping including their advances in program management, organisational development and change management on a few selected initiatives. We were able to connect the ‘winning combination’ of factors that had helped them be successful to date and the core success factors of effective change management. One of the drivers was the CEO’s passion and focus and we were able to loop him into these conversations and connect effective change management to his drive to deliver. Using best practice data and real-life examples from other organisations was critical, given the culture of the organisation and strong engineering background.

We believed that a deep and open review of the health of 5 of the 10 strategic initiatives underway against international bench marking was imperative, rather than just a ‘2-hour presentation about Change Management’. We recommended a deep dive workshop with the Executive team, sponsored by the CEO and we co-designed the workshop with him. We facilitated a very robust discussion with the Executive team about what it would take to really land the results of these initiatives. Initially a 4hour starter session, the Executive team agreed to clear their diaries and it became 8 hours of getting to the bottom of the opportunities and benefits of bringing in the people-side of the changes underway and, in particular, the number one success factor: effective Sponsorship.

Results/Outcomes

  • Within 3 days of the workshop, the CEO reduced the core initiatives from 10 to 5, making more time available for the Executive team members leading each initiative to take on the actions of effective sponsorship. Within 4 weeks, road blocks reduced and decision making was faster and, as the Sponsors were communicating more about why these changes were needed, resistance started to ease.
  • Change leads were assigned to each of the 5 initiatives and worked alongside the project manager to report directly to the initiative sponsor. Within 3 weeks, each of the 5 initiatives had a health check, impacted groups were identified and tactics were in place to improve readiness and adoption.
  • KPIs were added to each initiative to reflect the impact of the actions of each Sponsor. The Leadership Capability Framework the organisation had developed was amended to include Change Sponsorship skills for emerging leaders to Executive level. Over the next 6 months, the OD team added online learning modules and are looking into coaching for more senior leaders.
  • The Executive team realised that sponsorship of some of the initiatives needed to be altered to reflect the true owner of the outcomes and people needing to adopt the change and made those changes. That led to 3 of the 5 initiatives moving into improved health and increased likelihood of success within 4 months.
Change in Practice Case Study - utilities

Examples of client work

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