Have you downloaded your ten free change planning tools?
NEWSFLASH: I’ve added sample QuickStart Guide content to the download package, so if you’ve already downloaded the 10 Free Change Planning Tools, you’ll want to download them again to get this bonus content.
Research shows that 70% of change efforts fail. There are many reasons why, including that many people find the planning of a change effort overwhelming and lack tools for making the process more visual, collaborative and human.
Following the successful launch of my latest book Charting Change and a suite of tools called the Change Planning Toolkit™, I have made several access levels available to spread the methodology and help get everyone literally on the same page for change:
I am making 10 free change planning tools from the toolkit available as 11″x17″ downloads along with JUST ADDED sample content from the QuickStart Guide,
and buyers of the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License will get access to all 50+ tools for individual educational use at an 11″x17″ size — a $1,200 value.
I am very excited to share with you the Change Planning Toolkit™, including the popular Visual Project Charter™, Change Planning Canvas™ and many other great tools for increasing your change success!
Increase your consulting revenue or your organizational agility and get a jump on your competition!
Site licenses are available for professional or commercial use starting at $2/yr per employee*, and include access to poster size versions of many of the tools (35″x56″).
*Bronze Site Licenses have a one-time setup fee of $299. Site License fee based on total number of employees in the organization.
Below you’ll find a downloadable presentation that gives you five reasons to invest in the Change Planning Toolkit™:
The pace of change is accelerating, and for many people (and companies) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and retreat to the familiar instead of embracing the change. In fact we are approaching a tipping point where what is becoming interesting to the young is not the new, but the old. Vintage Michael Jordan sneakers, vinyl albums, rotary telephones, and analog amplifiers all have growing numbers of fans. In fact, vinyl album sales are increasing as CD sales decrease.
People are becoming so overwhelmed by the speed of change that the next new thing doesn’t always feel so new, and so those seeking to be on the cutting edge are increasingly looking backward for inspiration. Beards and hats have made a comeback, and before you know it the tattoo craze will have run its course. But is it the accelerating pace of change that people feel overwhelmed by, in their work lives and their personal lives, or is it a lack of tools for successfully planning and executing change that leads to people feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the constant need to change?
Some people would argue that the pace of change is outstripping our ability as humans to cope with all of the changes we are being expected to absorb. I would argue that we are in the middle of a period of discontinuity thrust upon us by the rapid advances in computing and mobile connectivity that have put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a target on most companies’ backs.
Digital Transformation is Being Forced Upon Us
Because we as consumers are seeing better customer experiences enabled by digital technologies in parts of our personal lives and more efficient and effective business processes in parts of our business lives, we are now expecting every company and every aspect of that company to deliver an efficient, effective experience and information exchange in whatever channel we choose, whenever we want to experience it.
This incredible change in expectations is being thrust upon all organizations simultaneously and threatening the very existence of entities that have existed for dozens or even hundreds of years. This discontinuity has created immense technical debt for organizations large and small to overcome and the only way for an incumbent organization to recover and to survive in this new digital age will be to undergo a complete digital transformation. This doesn’t mean creating a digital strategy to address one part of the organization or a single constituency, but a path to a complete transformation that brings digital approaches to both every part of the organization and its operations, but also to all of its constituencies, at the same time.
This means re-imagining every system, every policy, every procedure, and every process as a digital native company looking to enter and disrupt your industry might, and then make a plan for transforming yourself. This will require IMMENSE amounts of change, and is no small task given the 70% change failure rate, but it is the key to your organization’s survival.
A Problem and A Solution Emerge
The problem is that in twenty years of research, travels around the world delivering keynote speeches and workshops interacting with countless audiences on the topics of innovation and change, I have not uncovered one set of tools that makes change seem less scary, that can make the change planning process more human, and change execution more successful. The organizational change thought leadership status quo isn’t up to the task of planning and executing the scope and scale of change required for existing organizations to survive the digital evolution underway. A new wave of change thinking and a new set of tools are needed to displace the old guard. In short, I’ve decided to start a change revolution to free people from the tyranny of the blank word document and poorly planned change efforts. Who’s with me?
Today I am excited to announce the availability of the Change Planning Toolkit™, a Quickstart Guide to help explain what each of the more than fifty (50+) frameworks, worksheets and other tools are for, and most importantly, my latest book Charting Change to introduce you to the concepts behind the toolkit and its proper use. What I did find in my travels and my research referenced above were some good theories on behavior change and change leadership, and those, along with a couple of great case studies from Qualcomm and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and guest expert pieces from nearly a dozen hand-picked contributors, you will find in Charting Change. For my part, I’ve created a lot of great new theories and frameworks that you can put into practical use with the accompanying Change Planning Toolkit™. People who purchase a copy of the book will get access to an educational license for 26 of the 50+ frameworks, worksheets and other tools contained in the toolkit, including the Change Planning Canvas™ to pull your plan all together on one page (a $500 value). Individual and site licenses for the full version of the toolkit are available.
But I can’t do it alone.
Come Join the Change Revolution
I’m seeding the clouds with Charting Change and with the Change Planning Toolkit™, but I need you to make it rain.
The first 50+ tools in the toolkit are my own, the result of thousands of hours of work and years of effort. But I know once you download the 10 Free Downloads, or buy a copy of the book and get access to the first 26 of the 50+ tools in toolkit, or upgrade to the full toolkit and unlock all 50+ tools, that some of you may want to:
Contribute a new tool to the Change Planning Toolkit™ (with full credit of course) to help accelerate change capabilities in organizations around the world
Use the Change Planning Toolkit™ in your consulting business to help your clients and increase your revenue
Become a preferred provider by translating the Change Planning Toolkit™ into additional languages, and earn a portion of any revenue from your translation at the same time
Attend a train the trainer session to become a certified Change Planning Toolkit™ professional in order to spread the knowledge across your organization, or if you’re a consultant, to offer training sessions as an additional business offering
The reason I’m not trying to hold everything dear is that I have a full-time job transforming the insurance business and can’t be running around the world doing consulting work for clients. Instead I thought it made more sense to empower as many consultants and practitioners as possible to properly use the intellectual property I’ve created (and the additional intellectual property that others are likely to contribute) to help your organizations (or your clients’ organizations) cope with the accelerating pace of change.
I know that together we can change how we plan and execute changes big and small all around the world. And for those of you who think that the toolkit and methods are designed to only help plan and execute large changes (‘Capital C’ changes like mergers, acquisitions, transformations, etc.), I would like to remind you that small changes (‘lowercase c’ changes like projects and campaigns) can use the toolkit too. The fact is that every project changes something, and so every project is a change effort. That is why in my Architecting for Change framework, project management is shown as a subset of change management, not the other way around. So, whether you are a consultant, a professor, a teacher, a project manager, a vice president or a CIO, I hope you’ll join the change revolution, get your copy of Charting Change today and check out the Change Planning Toolkit™!
In The Five Keys to Successful Change I highlight five key areas for organizations to focus on if they are serious about building a strong, sustainable capability in organizational change, including:
Change Planning
Change Leadership
Change Management
Change Maintenance
Change Portfolio Management
As you can see Change Management is but one of five keys to sustainable change success, but it is one of the most important. It is also the only one of the five that has its own professional association and working to establish itself as a recognized profession, complete with its own certification.
To get to a place where you can have a certification, you must have a collection of shared knowledge. In project management, they have the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) maintained by the Project Management Institute (PMI) in support of the certification of Project Management Professionals (PMP). For change management professionals, this is The Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) Standard for Change Management, also referred to as ACMP’s Standard.
The main components of the standard according to the ACMP brochure include:
1. Evaluating Change Impact and Organizational Readiness
Reviews the overall change and how it will impact the organization
Establishes whether the organization is ready and able to handle the proposed change
2. Formulating Change Management Strategy
Develops the approach for moving an organization from current state to desired future state in order to achieve specific organizational outcomes
3. Developing Change Management Plans
Documents the scope, actions, timelines and resources needed to deliver the change
4. Executing Change Management Plans
Addresses the implementation processes for performing the change activities by monitoring, measuring, and controlling delivery against baseline plans
5. Closing the Change Management Effort
Documents the actions and resources needed to close the change once the Change Management Strategy is achieved and activities are deemed sustainable and maintainable
But managing change is extremely complicated and there is much more involved in doing it well than can be achieved just looking at these five high level phases, so there is a lot more detail contained in ACMP’s Standard, highlighted for you below:
5.1 Evaluate Change Impact and Organizational Readiness
— 5.1.1 Define the Change
— 5.1.2 Determine Why the Change is Required
— 5.1.3 Develop a Clear Vision of the Future State
— 5.1.4 Identify Goals, Objectives, and Success Criteria
— 5.1.5 Identify Sponsors Accountable for the Change
— 5.1.6 Identify Stakeholders Affected by the Change
— 5.1.7 Assess the Change Impact
— 5.1.8 Assess Alignment of the Change with Organizational Strategic Objectives and Performance Measurement
— 5.1.9 Assess External Factors that may Affect Organizational Change
— 5.1.10 Assess Organization Culture(s) Related to the Change
— 5.1.11 Assess Organizational Capacity for Change
— 5.1.12 Assess Organizational Readiness for Change
— 5.1.13 Assess Communication Needs, Communication Channels, and Ability to Deliver Key Messages
— 5.1.14 Assess Learning Capabilities
— 5.1.15 Conduct Change Risks Assessment
5.2 Formulate the Change Management Strategy
— 5.2.1 Develop the Communication Strategy
— 5.2.2 Develop the Sponsorship Strategy
— 5.2.3 Stakeholder Engagement Strategy
— 5.2.4 Develop the Change Impact and Readiness Strategy
— 5.2.5 Develop the Learning and Development Strategy
— 5.2.6 Develop the Measurement and Benefit Realization Strategy
— 5.2.7 Develop the Sustainability Strategy
5.3 Develop the Change Management Plan
— 5.3.1 Develop a Comprehensive Change Management Plan
— 5.3.2 Integrate Change Management and Project Management Plans
— 5.3.3 Review and Approve the Change Plan in Collaboration with Project Leadership
— 5.3.4 Develop Feedback Mechanisms to Monitor Performance to Plan
5.4 Execute the Change Management Plan
— 5.4.1 Execute, Manage, and Monitor Implementation of the Change Management Plan
— 5.4.2 Modify the Change Management Plan as Required
5.5 Complete the Change Management Effort
— 5.5.1 Evaluate the Outcome Against the Objectives
— 5.5.2 Design and Conduct Lessons Learned Evaluation and Provide Results to Establish Internal Best Practices
— 5.5.3 Gain Approval for Completion, Transfer of Ownership, and Release of Resources
Obviously there is a lot more value in looking at this more complete view of the content of ACMP’s Standard than in looking at the five components of the standard. A number of different people provided input into ACMP’s Standard and so there is a lot of good information in it, and I’d encourage you to download it and check it out. For my part, I’ve been all the way through it as part of the research for my new book Charting Change, in part because I wanted to ensure that my new book and the accompanying Human-Centered Change™ methodology are consistent with ACMP’s Standard so that practicing change management professionals can pick up my Change Planning Toolkit™ and begin using it right away to simplify their change planning process and increase their rate of successful change adoption.
But the ACMP’s Standard for Change Management, because of its breadth, can be difficult for people to digest and easily access quickly and so to help with that challenge I have created a visualization of the standard (pictured above) as a scalable 11”x17” free download for people to download and share with others or post on their cubicle or office wall for easy reference, with a free 35”x56” poster size version available now too! The visualization will help you see at a glance how the main components and all of their sub-components inter-relate and come together to create a comprehensive approach to change management. I hope you download and enjoy the ACMP Standard for Change Management visualization, share it freely with your friends and colleagues, and get added value from the other free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™!
Have you downloaded your ten free change planning tools?
I am making 10 free change planning tools from the toolkit available as 11″x17″ downloads along with JUST ADDED sample content from the QuickStart Guide,
but book buyers will get access to the Change Planning Toolkit™ Basic License (26 of 50 tools) at 11″x17″ size — a $500 value,
and buyers of the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License will get access to all 50+ tools for individual educational use at an 11″x17″ size — a $1,200 value.
Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.
