Tag: management

A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Checklist For Success (Step I)

Is your project on the path to success or to become one of the many that fail to achieve the expected benefits?

The lessons I’ve learned, from the past twenty-five years of working with senior leadership of Fortune 500 corporations to prepare for enterprise-wide change, can help you avoid mistakes that can prevent your change initiative from succeeding.


There are six critical requirements for success:

  1. Shared Vision
  2. Understanding of the Full Impact to the Organization
  3. Effective Stakeholder Engagement
  4. Clear, Consistent and Continual Communication
  5. Adequate Preparation
  6. A Plan to Sustain

We will focus on one requirement in each of the next six blogs as a step you can take to minimize resistance, increase readiness, and realize the benefits of a successful change initiative. Together, they can serve as a checklist to evaluate the current status of your project.

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A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Assessing Impact (Step II)

Is your project on the path to success or to becoming one of the many that fail to achieve the expected benefits?

Step One, Shared Vision, was the focus of my previous article.  We will now shift our focus to Step Two: Understanding the Full Change Impact to the Organization

Have you identified the degree and type of changes required to realize your project’s benefits?


If not, how can people be prepared when you haven’t determined what type of change to prepare them for?

There is no such thing as a “small” change. Change has a ripple effect that is often underestimated. A change in technology will require a change in process that will affect how and where work is done.

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A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Checklist for Success (Step III)

Effectively Engaging Stakeholders  

The third step on the path to success is to effectively engage stakeholders. A stakeholder is anyone who will experience change because of your project or who has the ability to influence the outcome of your project.  The keywords here are impact and influence.

The Impact Assessment, described in Step 2, is a tool to identify the type and degree of change and the areas and individuals affected. You can identify the high influence stakeholders by asking who has the power – whether formal or informal – to prevent your project from achieving success. Your Stakeholder Engagement Plan established the timeline, defines key objectives and describes the approach to involving the high impact/high influence stakeholders throughout the project.

Communication alone is not sufficient to achieve the level of support and preparation high impact/high influence stakeholders require for your project to be successful. Engaging the right stakeholders at the right time in the right way creates an opportunity for them to take ownership of the outcome.  They become part of what is happening instead of an observer or a victim of what will be different. We are less likely to resist what we have a voice in creating.

Continue reading “A Manager’s Guide to Managing Change: Checklist for Success (Step III)”