What is the change resource problem? Two items came across my consciousness recently which are not difficult to link. The first is a set of lessons learned from projects in an organisation. An outstanding item of the lessons is the complaint that not enough people resources were available, or the people allocated already had a …
Category archives: Resourcing Change
Knowledge or Competence?
What do employers want from their employees: knowledge or competence? I visited a client recently who told me they were re-orienting their training because they needed people who can do things, they distinguished between “know how and know what”. Know how is knowledge, often raw and not contexualised, classically this knowledge is gained in a …
Keeping change strategic
Strategic focus and effective communication Corporate business consultants are discovering that effective management requires a continuous focus on the strategic objectives of the organisation.
Change Saturation
Too Much Change Many people in organisations are reporting that they are doing “too much change”. Which usually means they feel they are not able to cope with the changes they are being asked to carry out. To understand what this means we need to look at three forces going on in an organisation: The …
Where projects end and change begins
Change adds value to projects In a recent Prosci article the author provides useful questions to elicit the value of doing people change on top of a delivery project. I also find that many people in the project world just don’t get the ‘change’ bit. A large multinational company I have talked to wants to …
Change Advocates — a good idea?
The idea of advocating change Change advocates both promote change in a business and help protect staff from poor change implementation. They do this by advocating the change on behalf of the business and being a channel between affected staff and senior managers. The role demands trust and respect from both staff and managers; here …
Design your change around decisions
Decisions first, organisation later Which do you think should come first: the definition of the task to be carried out or the team to do the task? So what happens when an organisation needs to change: the top manager re-organises his senior team to prepare for the change. This seems to be putting the cart …
It's still the Senior Manager wot did it
Contributors to Change Success A recent email from Prosci about their 2013 survey (results published this year) lists the top seven contributors to change success. This is probably the most important result from the survey and the most widely reported. Top of the list, again, and by a large margin is ‘active and visible executive …
Where does change management fit?
Inside, outside, alongside In a recent tutorial, Prosci proposed some models for organising a change team with a project team. They came up with four models described below. I think they missed the most important model. Read through the article and see if you agree with me.
Lessons from Big Science
A comment piece in a recent edition of the economist looked at lessons that the rest of the world can take from the collaborative projects in Big Science. Big Science is things like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN at which the existence of the famous Higgs Particle was demonstrated to world wide interest. The …