Avoid these 3 fatal mistakes when assessing the impact of a Change

When managing change in organisations, the core input is the change impact assessment which informs the change strategy and plan.  How well you manage the change is dependent on how well the people who are responsible for introducing the change in the organisation understand the impacts of the change they are introducing.  

It's true, that the more experienced you are in assessing change impacts the better you will be at it. Throughout my career I have learned lessons where I have underestimated the change, and while hindsight may be a wonderful thing, you do get to know the pitfalls and traps of certain types of change. You certainly become better at asking the right questions over time. 

So whether you are a Change Manager, a Change Leader or a people leader of an area going through a change, here are the 3 fatal errors you may make when assessing impacts. 

1) Failing to explore the history or backstory of the change you are introducing. This can really effect the change approach you take and if you don't ask the 'history' related questions you will be putting together an approach that will be rejected at the first step of the change.

Here are some historical considerations to take into account:

- has this been tried before? I have come into an organisation where people have mocked whether the project I was working on was going to actually eventuate. 'We have been waiting years for this' was the feedback I was given time and time again. I just emphasised that I don't hang around if projects stall as I like to get things done, and then when I started introducing the change, all the impacted parties knew we meant business. The change sponsors started their vision setting by acknowledging that everyone had been waiting a long time for this. A great foundation to build from. If you understand the historical context, you can also make sure you avoid the pitfalls with the territory. 

- has something similar been done before? Many Change Managers come into an organisation and start from scratch realising they don't need to. Now the exact same change may not have been introduced before but a similar one may have and you can learn from that change implementation and do things that worked, and improve the things that didn't. I always recommend at the end of a change that a lessons report is completed just for this purpose.

- is this change dependent on something else to be right? For example if you are adding an IT module to a system, is it dependent on data quality from another module which may be substandard, which can result in a high error rate? 

 2) Not assessing ALL dimensions of a change and underestimating the impact. One of the most important inclusions in my Change Basics course was the step by step walkthrough of the Change Impact assessment tool. I included all of the key dimensions of change to be considered, however if you decide not to cover them all off you may very well underestimate the impact of the change.

When you are managing change you don't have to be the expert in the change itself, but you do need to explore all dimensions of the change. For example, when you may be brought on to work on a system change, all IT systems sit within a business process context. They either automate a process or support part of it. Therefore you need to explore what processes are impacted by the change. Explore who undertakes those processes as it may expand the impacted audiences.

3) Doing a 'desk top' impact assessment only. Doing a desk top impact assessment is like me talking about managing change in organisations without ever having run a change program. It is just plain wrong!

Assessing impacts is not an academic exercise. The only way you can be confident that you have captured everything is by workshopping and validating the assessments with the groups who are mentioned and impacted. Whilst it has never happened in my career, I have had it mentioned to me by other change managers that they were blocked from engaging with the impacted groups and I could not even fathom why that would be the case. Without engaging those impacted there would be no confidence in the change plan.

So unless you have engaged those who are impacted to make sure you have captured all of the dimensions of the change, then don't expect that your change plan will be worth the paper that it is written on.

These are the 3 fatal mistakes you may make when assessing the impact of a change, so I recommend the next time you are managing change in an organisation and are assessing the impacts, be sure to avoid them!