In order to succeed, businesses must constantly evolve. Companies must constantly reassess and readjust what they’re offering to customers, how they carry out key processes, who’s responsible for what tasks and how they could be improving. Running a business is a constant game of trial and error, and so companies have got to be nimble and be able to adjust to big changes if they want to survive.
Unfortunately, change isn’t always well received. When a business owner decides to bring about a big shift at his or her company, individual stakeholders don’t always react with enthusiasm — and sometimes, these changes don’t work well for the company as a collective.
That’s why businesses should always draft a Change Management Plan to help guide staff members and stakeholders through those rocky transition periods.
What is a Change Management Plan?
Simply put, a Change Management Plan is a working document that spells out activities or roles that will need additional focus during the execute and control stage of a project or noticeable institutional change.
For example, if you’re introducing a new middle manager into your workforce, planning to make staff redundancies, or are preparing to add new steps into a manufacturing process, you are going to cause tremors across your company’s workforce. By drafting a Change Management Plan, you should be able to measure and mitigate any potential resistance or unintentional drawbacks of implementing said changes.
How To Write a Change Management Plan?
Change Management Plans come in two varieties. The first type is designed to measure the impact of an institutional change with a view to ease any necessary transitions. The second type of Change Management Plan is put in place to track progress on particular projects. This type of plan sees change measured against a project baseline — which is generally going to be a detailed outline of a project’s scope, schedule and its budget.
Both types of Change Management Plans have a few basic things in common.
First and foremost, all Change Management Plans must start by demonstrating the reasons for a change — such as addressing performance gaps, emerging technologies or waning consumer activity. Then, a plan must define the scope of recommended changes. You’ll need to outline how you’re reacting to issues, which job roles it could affect or any potential policy or organizational changes. After that, you must identify a series of KPIs that can be used to measure progress and success.
A Change Management Plan must also provide a description of stakeholder support, and will ideally elect a change management team that will be responsible for maintaining constant communication with stakeholders throughout the implementation period of any given change. This list must include all employees, as well as any partner organizations such as suppliers, contractors or major clients.
If you need help writing your first Change Management Plan, there are plenty of templates out there that can help get you started. But at the end of the day, this is a task that all business owners should make a habit of carrying out.
Change is good — but being able to get everybody on the same page and carry out a major transition can make or break even the best company.
Change Management Photo via Shutterstock
This article, “What is a Change Management Plan and Why Does Your Small Business Need One?” was first published on Small Business Trends