Organizational Change Management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from current state to a desired future state. The outcome of “People Change Management” is the number one reason why projects will either succeed or fail.
The Organizational Change Management Plan provides a framework to effectively lead your affected stakeholders through the changes that occur within a project. I will address this topic in four posts starting with this one (defining the roles and responsibilities). The topics for the remaining posts are :
- Preparing for Change
- Managing Change
- Reinforcing Change
Roles and Responsibilities
Defining the roles within the team and organization ensures that the team members understand their role in effecting the change within the organization. Use the table below to define the roles, describe the responsibilities and define the names of who will fill the role.
| Role | Description/Responsibility | Name(s) |
| Executive Sponsor/ Change Champion | “Face” of the project communicating directly with employees and management Participate actively and visibly throughout the project Build a coalition of sponsorship and manage resistance – identify other Executives who will Champion the change | |
| Change Management Resource/Team | Formulate change management strategy – evaluate how big the change is and who will be impacted Develop change management plan – determine what actions will be taken to enable moving people forward including a communication plan, sponsor roadmap, a coaching plan, training plan and resistance management plan Execute plan with the other “doers” on the project | |
| Change Agents (Middle managers and supervisors) | These are people that have influence in the organization that can be an advocate for change Communicator of the change – become well versed in the changes that are occurring and why so they can communicate the message to the employees Coach – trained in how to help the employees through the change Liaison between the employees and the change management/project team taking direction and providing feedback on the “buzz” in the organization |
Get these commitments well in advance. Don’t assume you can ask people to fill these roles “on the fly”. Change management tasks take a lot of effort and need to be well planned.
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