Tag Archives: Tools

Free Change Planning Toolkit™ Access for All*

3 Free Change Planning Toolkit™ Site Licenses*According to multiple sources, including McKinsey, 70% of change efforts fail. The reason many change efforts fail is that they often lack a clear plan.

So, what’s a company struggling to keep up with the accelerating pace of change to do?

Why not revolutionize your ability to change faster than the competition using the Change Planning Toolkit™?

Change Planning Wall

The Change Planning Toolkit™ allows you to:

  1. Quickly visualize, plan and execute on your change initiative (from simple projects to complicated mergers or acquisitions)
  2. Deliver projects and change efforts on time
  3. Accelerate implementation and adoption
  4. Get a lot of valuable tools for a much lower cost than lesser offerings

Change Planning Toolkit Valuable Tools

I believe so much in the power of the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I am willing to offer a free* site license to the next three (3) firms to purchase a Change Planning Toolkit™ training session (which includes train-the-trainer).

For large companies like IBM, Accenture, Amazon, GE, Wells Fargo, Cognizant, HP Enterprise, Convergys, Oracle, or Microsoft, a free* site license represents a savings of up to $830,000 on tools with a value of nearly $500 million for a nominal investment in one day of training.

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Book a Training Session and get a free* site license
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The Change Planning Toolkit™ will help you increase:

  • Alignment
  • Collaboration
  • Engagement
  • Buy-In
  • Visibility
  • Transparency
  • Agility
  • Speed
  • Adoption

Change Planning Toolkit Benefits

While decreasing:

  • Project Risk
  • Failure
  • Cost Overruns
  • Late Deliveries
  • Surprises
  • Confusion
  • Resistance
  • In-Fighting
  • Staff Turnover

In addition, consulting firms will be able to increase their revenue and customer lifetime values using the Change Planning Toolkit™ and earn extra revenue as a reseller.

Change Planning Toolkit Benefits for Consulting Firms

Meanwhile, after the training, the QuickStart Guide and my book Charting Change (which training participants will receive**) will keep you (and your clients) on track and reinforce your learning.

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Book a Training Session and get a free* site license
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People can also get the Change Planning Toolkit™ for individual educational use for only $99.99/year (or $999.99 for a lifetime license).

* The site license is free for the first year. After 365 days it can be renewed for a very affordable $2/employee per year. Each employee gets access to tools that other companies might charge up to $20,000 for a single user to access.

** Depending on the country, book will be provided in either hardcover or digital form to training participants, but not both

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Book a Training Session and get a free* site license
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Change Planning Toolkit™ Ask Me Anything Transcript

Change Planning Toolkit™ Ask Me Anything Transcript

On Thursday, June 8th I took all questions about the Change Planning Toolkit™ on TWITTER via hashtag #cptoolkit and my contact form. Here were the questions and the answers:

1. I bought your insightful book Charting Change – How can I get the supplementary materials (26 of 50 Change Planning Toolkit™ tools) that go with the book?

Charting Change book buyers can contact me using my contact form here and get me their proof of purchase. Then I will send out the Change Planning Toolkit™ Basic License to them as an 11″x17″ scalable pdf download.

Book buyers can upgrade from the Basic License to the Bronze License or get their organization on the path to success with a site license at any time.

2. Who is the Change Planning Toolkit™ designed for?

The Change Planning Toolkit™ was designed for change leaders, project managers, and program managers to make it easier to successfully plan and execute projects, programs, change initiatives, business transformations, and digital transformations.

Change Planning Canvas

3. I’ve heard amazing things about the Change Planning Canvas™ – How can I get a copy of it? Is there a poster size?

Buy a copy of my latest book Charting Change, contact me with proof of purchase and I’ll send out the 11″x17″ of the Change Planning Canvas™ along with 25 other great tools!

Or, purchase a basic individual educational license and you’ll get instant access to these same 26 of 50+ tools along with a digital copy of the book (hardcover option in certain geographies).

Or, purchase a bronze individual educational license for the Change Planning Toolkit™ and you’ll get all 50+ tools, including the Change Planning Canvas™ in a scalable 11″x17″ pdf PLUS a Quickstart Guide PLUS several discounts.

There is a 35″x56″ poster size version of the Change Planning Canvas™ available for commercial site licensees. Consulting and training companies looking to grow their business, or organizations looking to increase their organizational agility and beat the 70% change failure rate should contact me about site licenses starting at $2/yr per employee.

4. What exactly is the Change Planning Toolkit™?

The Change Planning Toolkit is collection of 50+ tools to make change planning more visual, collaborative, and fun!

It is designed to be used by PMP’s in project management as well, and dovetails nicely with the ACMP Change Standard for change management professionals. In fact you can get a nice ACMP Standard Visualization in the ten free downloads.

5. What do people get when they purchase the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License?

People who purchase the individual educational license of the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License $1,200 worth of items for the extremely low price of $99.99/year (or $999.99 for a lifetime license) that will fundamentally transform how you plan and execute ALL of your projects and change initiatives, from this point forward, greatly increasing:

  • Project success rates
  • Organizational agility
  • Ability to beat the competition
  • Collaboration levels inside the organization
  • The innovation capacity of the organization
  • Employee retention
  • And more!

I answered most of the specifics in question three, but just to recap in a simpler way, if you purchase the bronze license, you get access to:

  • 11″x17″ scalable pdf version of all 50+ tools (including the Change Planning Canvas™)
  • QuickStart Guide
  • Use of the tools for individual educational use unless a commercial site license is purchased (starting at $2/yr per employee + small setup fee)
  • 35″x56″ poster size scalable downloads for key tools (COMMERCIAL SITE LICENSES ONLY)

6. What differentiates the Change Planning Toolkit™ from the competition?

First of all, I created the Change Planning Toolkit™ because so much of what project managers and change practitioners need to be successful didn’t exist!

So, it has been designed to play well with the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) from the Project Management Institute (PMI), the Change Standard from the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP), and ADKAR from ProSci. But, the Change Planning Toolkit™ delivers value for project managers and change practitioners that those can’t.

In fact, I created a Visual Project Charter™ and a visualization of the ACMP Change Standard as free downloads to help ACMP and PMP practitioners be more successful within their existing frameworks.

So, no matter what project management or change management methodology you like to use, the Change Planning Toolkit™ will feel familiar, and will increase your ability to achieve success with the kinds of projects and change initiatives you’re already running!

7. What’s your view on change management versus project management?

Most people talk about change management as if it is a subset of project management, but that’s so not true!

People need to change this thinking because it’s a big reason why so many projects fail.

Instead what we need to do is to flip this thinking on its head and start seeing project management as a subset of change management. One of the 50+ tools in the toolkit (and in the book) visualizes what such a world can and SHOULD look like. It’s called Architecting the Organization for Change:

Architecting the Organization for Change

You’ll notice that all five of the Five Keys to Change Success are all represented here. 🙂

What’s next?

Look for more AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions on the Change Planning Toolkit™ and The Experiment Canvas™ in future weeks!

FYI – On Twitter I am @innovate if you aren’t already following me.


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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What’s Next – The Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™

What's Next - The Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™… and a new Innovation Intervention service.

People have been asking me recently – What’s next?

I think managers and leaders are wondering now that I’ve written two popular books (Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire) and a chapter in a third (A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing), if I’ll ever write another book.

But, they’re also curious given all the great tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ that can fundamentally transform how we plan our projects and change initiatives, helping individuals and organizations move beyond theory to practice, whether I’ll ever create anything similar to help companies increase their innovation success.

The answer to both questions is a resounding YES!

I am pursuing, in parallel, the Define, Design, and Develop phases on a number of different tools to form the basis of a Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ for organizations to leverage in pursuit of my evolution of value innovation.

If you’ve attended one of my innovation keynotes or workshops you’ve seen how my innovation viewpoint (Innovation is All About Value) leads to all types of innovation, including disruptive innovation, and how it links to LEAN methodologies so that organizations can organize and execute across the entire spectrum of improvement and innovation possibilities.

Some of my most recent clients, including The Bank of Montreal and OSF Healthcare, have received an advance preview of some of the early components of the upcoming Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™.

At the same time, I am also finishing efforts to define a new Innovation Intervention service offering to help organizations who have started an innovation effort or built an innovation program, only to see it go off the rails. I will work with organizations in an Innovation Intervention to help them get back on track towards success and build a foundation capable of sustaining continuous innovation. Forward-thinking organizations that haven’t begun an innovation program or a focus on innovation and want to get off to a strong start will be able to leverage this upcoming Innovation Intervention service too.

Finally, when I do write a third book, it will probably dig deeper into how to build an organization wired for continuous change, including successfully executing a digital transformation and sustaining full spectrum innovation and improvement excellence.

So, this is what’s next.

If you’d like to find out more about my Innovation Intervention or Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ in advance of their launch, in order to get a jump on your competition, please contact me.

Stay tuned for more information on these efforts soon!

Innovation Audit from Braden Kelley

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What is your level of Innovation Maturity?

Innovation Maturity Introduction

When it comes to innovation, no two companies are likely to be pursuing innovation in the same way, and they are also likely to be at different stages of innovation maturity. Because of this, even if you found out what your competitor’s innovation strategy was, it would be of no use to you. It is necessary for an innovation strategy to be tailored to your organization’s level of innovation maturity, your corporate strategy, and your innovation vision.

Free Innovation Maturity AssessmentAn organization’s innovation maturity level is important because you must first master a certain set of basic innovation capabilities before implementing more advanced innovation approaches into your strategy. For example, an organization just getting started on their innovation journey would be foolish to try and implement open innovation in their organization. Every organization should get their idea generation (including evolution), idea evaluation, and idea commercialization policies and processes working well with their employees first before opening themselves up to the outside world. Your organization’s innovation strategy must be appropriate to your level of innovation maturity for your innovation efforts to be successful.

I developed the graphic below to explain the different levels of innovation maturity based on some thinking from Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich, and I think it allows executives to determine at a glance where their organization is across the spectrum. I hope you find it useful.

Free Innovation Maturity Assessment

Special OfferTo help people evaluate their level of innovation maturity against the above graphic, I am sharing the 50 question innovation maturity assessment I use with clients. The assessment is most powerful when answers are gathered at multiple levels of the organization across several groups and several sites, but you can also fill it out yourself and get instant feedback – for FREE.

To get even more out of the innovation maturity assessment, for a nominal fee, I can help you organize a multiple group and/or multiple physical location survey of people in the organization to capture not just your level of innovation maturity, but also to provide preliminary innovation diagnostics on the areas of innovation challenge and opportunity in your organization.

I can set up a research study to capture a baseline innovation maturity level and analyze the data to unlock insights about the relative health of your innovation efforts. For a limited time, I will provide this service for the special introductory price of $499.99.

Click here to purchase the innovation diagnostic service
(Get help using the innovation maturity assessment across multiple sites and job functions and analyzing the results)

Innovation Maturity Model

Innovation Maturity Assessment Scoring Key (showing level of maturity)

Point totals are translated to the innovation maturity model as follows:

  • 000-100 = Level 1 – Reactive
  • 101-130 = Level 2 – Structured
  • 131-150 = Level 3 – In Control
  • 151-180 = Level 4 – Internalized
  • 181-200 = Level 5 – Continuously Improving

Click here to access the Innovation Maturity Assessment

Innovation Maturity Assessment Instructions

1. Read each statement and determine how much you agree with each one, using this scale:

  • 0 – None
  • 1 – A Little
  • 2 – Partially
  • 3 – Often
  • 4 – Fully

2. Select the answer for each question that is most appropriate.

The form will score the innovation maturity assessment and return a result to you via email along with the SCORING KEY and the Innovation Maturity Model graphic. Store the result as a baseline and come back annually and re-take the assessment to measure your progress!

Click here to access the Innovation Maturity Assessment

Click here to purchase the innovation diagnostic service
(Get help using the innovation maturity assessment across multiple sites and job functions and analyzing the results)

* Graphic adapted from the book Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich

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10 Free Change Planning Tools

Get Your 10 Free Change Planning ToolsHave 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:

Get 10 Free Downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™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,
Get 26 of the 50+ Change Planning Toolkit™ toolsbut book buyers will get access to the Change Planning Toolkit™ Basic License (26 of 50 tools) at 11″x17″ size — a $500 value,
Get all 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™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.

Change Planning Toolkit Levels and Free Downloads

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!

Click here to get your 10 Free Change Planning Tools

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™:


Click here to get your 10 Free Change Planning Tools
Sign up for the latest news and alerts


Click on the tool name to read the article about each of the 10 Free Change Planning Tools:

  1. Five Keys to Successful Change
  2. Architecting the Organization for Change
  3. Building a Global Sensing Network
  4. Visual Project Charter™
  5. Motivation Ability Worksheet
  6. PCC Change Readiness Framework
  7. Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation™
  8. ACMP Standard for Change Management® (Visualization)
  9. Organizational Agility Framework
  10. The Eleven Change Roles™


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Five Reasons to Invest in the Change Planning Toolkit™

2017 promises to be a year of unprecedented change. As a result, it will be imperative for managers to empower themselves with the tools that will help effectively lead the change initiatives that will be required to cope with political and economic turmoil and threats from digital entrants intent on disrupting the industry your company may now lead (or aspire to lead). Are you sure you’re ready to lead the change efforts your organization will need to survive in 2017 and beyond?

Before we move forward assuming that we’re equipped to succeed, let’s look backwards and ask the following questions:

1. How many of you tried to change something in your organization in 2016 and failed?

— Or had more trouble implementing the change than you would have liked?

2. How many of you ran a project that proved more difficult to execute than you expected?

Admit it. No matter how well the change initiatives or projects you lead in 2016 may have gone, they could have gone even better. As leaders we do the best with the knowledge, skills, abilities, and tools we have available to deliver the desired results. But, as we acquire new tools, or new knowledge, skills and abilities, we do even better.

2016 is almost over and as we continue to invest less of our time on executing 2016 projects and change initiatives and invest more time into planning our 2017 change efforts, this is the perfect time to acquire some new tools and master the new knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to use them to help us achieve more in 2017.

For change leaders and project managers, the Change Planning Toolkit™ represents one of the most powerful new toolboxes to learn how to master for 2017 and beyond.

The Change Planning Toolkit™ is introduced in my latest book Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan and designed to make the change planning process more visual and more collaborative in order to surface the hidden land mines as early as possible so they can be worked through, and to make the plan and progress against it more transparent as the project or change initiative progresses. And given that every project changes something, every project is a large or small change initiative!

There are many reasons the Change Planning Toolkit™ is worth far more than the small cost to acquire an individual education license for the toolkit to learn about the tools and how to use them. And organizations that empower their people with the tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ will not only become more agile than the competition, but will also benefit in the five following ways:

  1. Beat the 70% Change Failure Rate
  2. Quickly Visualize, Plan and Execute
  3. Deliver Projects and Change Efforts on Time
  4. Accelerate Implementation and Adoption
  5. Get Lots of Valuable, Powerful Tools for a Few $$$

There are licensing options for every situation.

Change practitioners and independent consultants can get an individual educational license to get comfortable with the tools in a 11″x17″ format. Upgrading to a site license will get you access to the poster size versions of key tools. Consulting firms and organizations of 100+ employees will find site licenses less expensive.

Site licenses are very affordable, starting at $2/year per employee and up, after the payment of a small license setup fee. Consulting firms will be able to use the tools to increase their revenue with clients, and companies will increase the speed and success of their change initiatives.

Independent consultants, consulting firms, and educational institutions can sign up as resellers and earn a 10% commission on all subsequent license sales.

The Bronze version of the Change Planning Toolkit™ is available now, and the Gold version will become available in the near future.

Public and private train the trainer sessions are available upon request.

Or you can kick off your next organizational change effort in style using the Change Planning Toolkit™ with me as the facilitator and start getting a jump on your competition.

  1. Click here to purchase an individual commercial license for one year
  2. Contact me to purchase a site license, to host a training session, or to book a facilitation

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Building a Strong Foundation for Change

Charting ChangeRecently I had the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with Will Sherlin of 3PillarGlobal about my latest book Charting Change on The Innovation Engine podcast.

In this conversation we focused on how to make change efforts stick within any organization. Among the topics we discuss are how non-software companies can still benefit from Agile methodologies, how to develop actions when the desire to make changes reaches a groundswell, ways to make changes seem less overwhelming and more human, and several other topics of organizational change, digital transformation, and innovation success. You can find the interview here on SoundCloud:

Most of what we talk about in this interview is highlighted in my latest book – Charting Change: A Visual Toolkit for Making Change Stick and my first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire: A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose, the keynote speeches and workshops I deliver around the world on the topics of innovation, change, and digital transformation, and in the revolutionary Change Planning Toolkit™.

The Change Planning Toolkit™ contains more than 50 visual, collaborative tools to help you beat the 70% change failure rate. You can get the listed number of tools from the Change Planning Toolkit™ by doing the following.

(10) – Visit the free downloads page
(26) – Buy the book
(50) – Purchase access to the Change Planning Toolkit™ (comes with a QuickStart Guide)

P.S. Site licenses for the Change Planning Toolkit™ and public and private training events are also available

Charting Change Quote Braden Kelley

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Why Change is Accelerating

Why Change is Accelerating

In previous articles I’ve spoken about how the pace of change is accelerating, and how for many people (and organizations) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and that things may be changing faster than some of us humans are able to absorb. I’ve spoken about how 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 organizations’ backs.

Why are things changing so fast?

Is it that we’ve hit some sort of inflection point never achieved before in human history that is allowing us to innovate and displace the status quo faster than ever before?

Maybe.

Have we reached some sort of perfect storm where the innovation curve has gone vertical and the singularity will be here tomorrow?

Probably not.

So if we are not necessarily innovating faster than ever before or destined to reach the singularity tomorrow and become one with machines, then what is creating the feeling that things are changing more rapidly?

One word…

“Expectations”

Changing Customer Expectations

It feels as if the world is changing faster than ever before because the expectations of our customers and our expectations as customers are changing faster than ever before. Why?

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 organization (not just companies) and every aspect of that organization 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 organization 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.

The problem is that 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 set of tools is needed. My new book Charting Change and the accompanying Change Planning Toolkit™ were designed to inspire a change revolution to free people from the tyranny of the blank word document and poorly planned change efforts.

Why the Pace of Change is Accelerating

Economics 101

Because the challenge we face is not a static one. Organizations that focus on catching up to where the customer is today and wedging their efforts into existing budget constraints are those that will find themselves falling further behind the curve of changing customer expectations.

No longer is it a victory to be seen by customers as ‘best in class’. No, now customers are expecting every organization to be ‘world class’. This means that increasingly customer satisfaction will be achieved only by providing one of the best experiences in the world. Talk about changing expectations!

And so given the time to develop new technology solutions, you should be aiming not to incrementally improve your current experience to get closer to the leaders in your industry, but instead investing in a solution that will anticipate what the best customer experience allowed by technology 12-18 months from now and start building that instead.

It’s Economics 101 all over again. In today’s reality, as most organizations seek to move up the customer experience supply curve, the customer experience demand curve is constantly shifting outward, leading your share of the market to wither and die unless you make the strategic investment required to actually shift your customer experience (CX) supply curve outward as well.

I’ve tried to capture the scenario in the figure above titled ‘Why the Pace of Change is Accelerating’. Most organizations when they see at Time0 that their level of customer experience is below Customer Expectations0 they invest in projects to increase their CX Supply0 up the CX Supply curve to CX Supply1 thinking that they will then be meeting the customers’ level of expectations at Time1. But that’s not how it works in the digital world of today, as customer expectations are changing (shifting upward) just as fast as the technology used to create better customer experiences. So, organizations that invest in moving up the CX Supply curve to catch up with current customer expectations find themselves continuously falling short of future customer expectations.

Conclusion

The reason nearly every organization follows this approach of climbing the CX Supply curve to close the gap on customer expectations is usually financial. Most managers are forced (or compelled) to try and close the gap with existing budgetary resources and by creating a digital strategy as part of these efforts. Very few organizations have visionary leaders willing to invest in a digital transformation and fundamentally re-think the architecture and capabilities the organization needs to successfully compete in a digital age. Very few organizations see how to properly use technology to fulfill the mission of the organization and to exceed customer expectations, and as a result create a shift outwards in the CX Supply Curve itself.

Choosing not to digitally transform your organization, creates the space in the market for new digital native organizations to enter and establish a beachhead and attack the incumbents.

At the same time, as our world and organizations continue to digitize this will result in decreasing variable costs and increasing fixed costs, leading to increased consolidation in many fragmented industries. Those organizations bold enough to invest in shifting their customer experience supply curves outward by undergoing a true digital transformation will improve their position to be a buyer instead of a seller as this consolidation occurs. So the real question is…

If we are living in an era of survival of the digital fittest, which side of the digital evolution do you want to be on?

I hope you’ll join the change revolution, get your copy of Charting Change today and check out the Change Planning Toolkit™!

Image credit: Winggz.com

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Digital Transformation versus Digital Strategy

In my last article, Digital Transformation Matters, we looked at the accelerating pace of change, the case for digital transformation, and our evolving interactions with technology. We also asked a simple question:

Are you ready to do business in a digital way for the digital age?

In our digital age all companies must change how they think, change how they interact with customers, partners, and suppliers, and change how the business works inside. Customer, partner, and supplier expectations have changed and a gap is opening between what they expect from their interaction with companies, and what those companies are currently able to deliver. Companies must immediately work to close this expectation gap or the entire business is at risk.

There are groups of digital natives out there that are extremely capable, have greater access to capital than ever before, and are very likely to re-imagine your business and your entire industry from the ground up if you don’t start making the necessary changes in your business to eliminate the opportunity.

If they attack, they will do it with a collection of digital strategies that utilize the power of the digital mindset to more efficiently and effectively utilize the available people, tools and technology, and to design better, more seamlessly interconnected and automated processes that can operate with only the occasional human intervention.

To defend your company’s very existence, you must start thinking like a technology company or go out of business. Part of that thinking is to fundamentally re-imagine how you structure and operate your business. You must look at your business and your industry in the same way that a digital native startup will if they seek to attack you and steal your market. To make this easier you can ask yourself five questions:

  1. If I were to build this business today, given everything that I know about the industry and its customers, and given all of the advances in people, process, technology and tools, how would I design it?
  2. From the customers’ perspective, where does the value come from?
  3. What structure and systems would deliver the maximum value with the minimum waste?
  4. What are the barriers to adoption and the obstacles to delight for my product(s) and/or service(s) and how will my design help potential customers overcome them?
  5. Where is the friction in my business that the latest usage methods of people, process, technology, and tools can help eliminate?

There are of course potentially other questions you may want to ask, but these five should get you most of the way to where you need to go in your initial strategic planning sessions. If you have other key questions that you think I’ve missed, please add them in the comments.

Digital Strategy vs. Digital Transformation

But how much appetite for going digital do you have?

This is where the question of digital strategy versus digital transformation comes in.

The two terms are often misused, in part by being used interchangeably when they are in fact two very different things.

A digital strategy is a strategy focused on utilizing digital technologies to better serve one particular group of people (customers, employees, partners, suppliers, etc.) or to serve the needs of one particular business group (HR, Finance, Marketing, Operations, etc.). The scope of a digital strategy can be quite narrow, such as using digital channels to market to consumers in a B2C company, or broader, such as re-imagining how marketing could be made more efficient through the use of digital tools like CRM, marketing automation, social media monitoring, etc. and hopefully become more effective at the same time.

Meanwhile, a digital transformation is an intensive process that begins by effectively building an entirely new organization from scratch utilizing:

  • All of the latest DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES (artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, BPM, crowd computing, etc.)
  • The latest TOOLS (robotics, sensors, etc.)
  • The latest best practices and emerging next practices in PROCESS (continuous improvement, business architecture, lean startup, Business Process Management (BPM), crowd computing, and continuous innovation using a tool like The Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation™)
  • The optimal use of the other three to liberate the PEOPLE that work for you to spend less time on bureaucratic work and more time imagining the changes necessary to overcome barriers to adoption and obstacles to delight through better leadership methods, reward/recognition systems, physical spaces, collaboration and knowledge management systems, etc.

And ends with a plan for making the transformation from the old way of running the business to the new way.

The planning of the digital transformation is of course all done collaboratively on paper, whiteboards, and asynchronous electronic communication (hopefully not email, but more on that later). The goal is to think like a digital native, to think like a startup, to approach the idea of designing a company to utilize all of the advances in people, process, technology and tools to kill off your own company (at least as you know it). Because, if you don’t re-invent your company now and set yourself up with a new set of capabilities that enable you to continuously re-invent yourself as a company, then some venture capitalist is going to see an opportunity, find the right team of digital natives, and give them the necessary funding to enter your market and re-invent your entire industry for you.

It’s All About the Interfaces

People are fascinated with startups like Uber and with good reason because they have changed the lexicon and the way that we think about entire categories of products and services. Whether or not you believe there is causation, the fact remains that Yellow Cab in San Francisco filed for bankruptcy, and that Uber has placed an immense amount of pressure on taxi and airport limousine companies. But you should also be looking at what established technology companies like Amazon are doing because established technology companies are looking for growth and new markets too, and they might decide yours looks attractive, so you have to think like a technology company or go out of business.

One way that technology companies differ from non-technology companies is that they naturally focus on the interfaces, because that is where complex systems often fail. And so, if you are pursuing a digital strategy on your way to a digital transformation, you must first pick an interface, and then optimize the experience at that interface. It could be the interface between the company and customers, it could be the company to employee or employee to employee interface, or even the company to partner or company to supplier interface. Whatever interface you choose, your goal is to ultimately look at that interface with a fresh modern lens, and then utilize all of the latest (and emerging) approaches from a people, process, and technology perspective, to create a more efficient and more effective (aka better) experience.

The better job you do as an organization at removing friction at the interfaces, the more likely you are to become a partner of choice, supplier of choice, employer of choice, and/or a brand of choice. The value of becoming any or all of these could be the difference between the survival and growth of the organization, and a slow, agonizing death at the hands of a new, digital entrant or a digitizing incumbent that completes a digital transformation before your leadership team can agree it’s even necessary.

Architecting Your Organization for Change

One thing that both a digital strategy and a digital transformation have in common is that they will inflict change (in varying amounts) upon the organization, and with a more visual, collaborative approach to planning that change – like that enabled by the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduce in my new book Charting Change (available February 24, 2016) – you will increase your odds of beating the 70% change failure rate and of successfully achieving your digital change goals.

As you plan your change efforts it helps if you keep in mind the Five Keys to Successful Change™ and that you consider Architecting Your Organization for Change. Below you will see visualizations of both concepts and both are available as free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™, which is a collection of frameworks, worksheets, and other tools (including the Change Planning Canvas™).

Five Keys to Successful Change 550

Architecting the Organization for Change

Click to access these frameworks as scalable 11″x17″ PDF downloads

These two frameworks will help you take a more holistic view of organizational change wider than just change management or change leadership, and helps organizations:

  1. Visualize a new way to increase organizational agility
  2. Integrate changes in the marketplace and customer behavior into the strategy
  3. Create a new organizational architecture that integrates all five elements of organizational change
  4. Make project, behavior and communications planning and management a central component of your change efforts
  5. One thing that should immediately jump out as you look at the Architecting the Organization for Change framework is that The Five Keys to Successful Change™ are embedded it.

Change Maintenance forms the foundation of a change-centric organization, ensuring that the changes necessary to ensure a healthy firm continue to persist (or are “maintained”), while the top of the organizational pyramid is driven by a conscious strategy that evolves over time, informed by changes in customer behavior and changes in the marketplace.

The strategy of the firm then determines the appropriate business architecture, and as the organization’s strategy changes, the business architecture may also need to change. Any necessary changes in the architecture of the business (new or updated capabilities or competencies) then will lead to modifications to the portfolio of change initiatives and projects (and remember every project is a change effort). These projects and initiatives will consist of innovation initiatives and efforts to create positive changes in the operations of the business.

The change efforts and projects identified as necessary and invested in as part of the change portfolio then represent projects that impact the innovation and operations for the firm, and in order to successfully execute them in the short term includes change planning, management, and leadership, and in the longer term the maintenance of the required changes.

And for the change efforts and projects to be successful the organization must also focus on project planning and management, behavior planning and management, and communications planning and management. The related projects, behaviors, and communications must all be effectively planned and managed in a way that keeps all three in sync.

I hope you see that by increasing your focus on the Change Planning discipline and through increased use of tools like the Architecting the Organization for Change framework from the Change Planning Toolkit™, your business will be able to more collaboratively and visually plan change efforts as large as a digital transformation or as small as a digital strategy and to increase your organizational agility.

More on organizational agility soon, so stay tuned!

In the meantime, please get yourself a copy of Charting Change as a hardcover (ebook coming soon) and get your free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ (or go ahead and purchase a license now).

Buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ NowNow you can buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ – Individual Bronze License – Advance Purchase Edition here on this web site before the book launches.

This article originally appeared on Linkedin

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Standardizing Change

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:

  1. Change Planning
  2. Change Leadership
  3. Change Management
  4. Change Maintenance
  5. Change Portfolio Management

Five Keys to Successful Change 550

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.

ACMP Standard Components

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.

ACMP Standard Visualization

Click to access this ACMP Standard for Change Management visualization as a FREE scalable 11″x17″ PDF download

Click to access this ACMP Standard for Change Management visualization as a FREE scalable 35″x56″ PDF poster size download

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™!

Sign up for Change Planning Toolkit™ launch updates

Buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ NowNow you can buy the Change Planning Toolkit™ – Individual Bronze License – Advance Purchase Edition here on this web site before the book launches.

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