Change Readiness Assessments: The Best-Kept Secret for Making Change Stick
Elizabeth is a freelance writer and project manager living and working in London. She runs The Otobos Group, a project communications consultancy specializing in project management.
A change readiness assessment is simply a survey that asks how ready the receiving organization is to take on the change. It looks at preparedness: Are teams and individuals equipped to take on the changes, and most importantly, make the change stick?
The more prepared people are before your project goes live, the more likely it is that the changes you deliver will have the desired benefits. You can probably think of projects where teams haven’t adequately prepared the customer for handover and the product or process improvement didn’t get used in the way that it should.
Change readiness assessments help you spot those problems before they happen and get teams geared up to accept the change. When I’ve used them, I have created a spreadsheet of questions or tasks that need to be done before I would consider the group receiving the change to be set up to get the most out of it. Some questions have “yes/no” answers. Some are marked on a sliding scale. For example, if the question was: Has the team tested the new processes? the answers would be:
- No one has been appointed to test the new processes.
- Someone has been appointed to test the new processes, but they haven’t done it yet.
- The processes have been tested.
- The processes have been signed off as fit for purpose.
Choose the answer that best fits the state of readiness for…
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