Understanding what change Readiness is is the first step here. It’s really a point at which you take the time to understand whether the business is ready for the change to actually be fully implemented. It’s understanding from an implementation perspective, from a willingness perspective, how ready the business is to really get going and execute. There are different views as to when you should do a change Readiness assessment. The view we’re taking here is you really should be doing this after you’ve done a change impact assessment because you need to understand all the impacts of the change first, document that, therefore have a view of what your change responses will be (training, communications, etc.). Once you know that, you can then go around the business and check in terms of readiness. What are the things we need to be aware of to ensure that this lands well? Are there any other barriers we haven’t understood before we get going? What are the perceptions, etc.? You can also use that time to further validate things such as whether you’ve understood your stakeholder needs properly, whether your change plan fully makes sense, and whether you’ve captured all your change impacts.
It’s really that kind of final Readiness Gateway before you begin to execute fully.
So how do you complete a change readiness assessment? Here are some example dimensions, so things that you’d want to look at:
Does the business fully understand the program vision?
Is there the right level of leadership commitment for this?
Have we got that before we begin to fully implement it? For example, you don’t want to go training everyone and realize that two leaders in key functions actually have been talking in a way that sounds like they don’t really understand or value what we’re doing. That should have been picked up before we went ahead.
Really understanding communications and engagement impact, so how have communications been received so far? What else do we need to do there?
Operational Readiness – is there anything that we haven’t picked up in the change impact assessment in terms of if we go ahead and implement this now, is it going to be a really busy season for the business, or lots of people be on holiday, or certain systems, processes, tools aren’t ready and up to scratch for this change?
General themes around people’s confidence and accepting it and any other skills and capability gaps.
How do you do it?
You could send out some quick surveys; you could go and do focus groups and interviews, very much depending on the size and scale, the size of the scale of your change, the size of the scale of your stakeholder landscape.
Reporting results
How might you report on a change readiness assessment? The easiest way to display it is with dimensions (the areas you’re measuring readiness against) down one axis, and then functions of the business/geographies/groups etc. going across the top, showing a readiness status (red, amber, green) for each. Then you can add another column with response/actions.
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