Has your Organization levelled up to LEVEL 3 in Organizational Change Management Maturity? It’s the middle of the road, but ahead of most!

Building a culture of continuous change and improvement is not easy, especially when many companies going through change also go through cutbacks. Hopefully your organization fosters a culture of true growth and pro-active change rather than reactive, and often destructive change, that takes away from the direction you are going and what you have been building together.

Change Management focuses on the people side of change from emotional, to practical, to actual benefits realizations. Project Management focuses on the project side. Together with change team subject experts, stakeholders, and the sponsoring organization you can bring about desired change from one state to another most effectively.

You will typically traverse three major phases: preparation, implementation, and follow-through. As your Organization assesses business gaps and business needs ahead of steering into a new direction it should assess its change maturity, including its capability and capacity to make these changes at this time.

At Storyboard PM we want to use Practical Principles of Change Management to help you get to a Level 5, so your career/business/organizational development goes more smoothly through better change management initiatives and better improvement project implementations.

Here’s our overview of Level 3 Change Management Maturity:

3) Systematic Functionally (Project Initiatives)
* Bottom-Up or Middle Management Change, but not initiated or fully integrated with Organizational Structure (Lack of Organizational Processes)
* More Consistent Change Management Practices Departmentally
* Multiple Projects in Different Departments
* Lack of Coordination across Department Teams
* Some Measurement of Change Efforts, or at least Recognition of KPI’s
* Some Project Change Leadership & Management, but may be informal still

In this phase of Organizational Change Management Maturity, your individuals and teams are still doing all of the heavy lifting, but mostly autonomously. It will be a miracle if they pull off what your organization wants from them. Without a structure and standard organizational processes in place (and maybe some overlooked automation enablement) your teams are doing their best to make up the difference, but they are mostly “flying blind”.

They do not see out of the windshield so to speak. “The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” from department to department (Or office to office as the case may be). Though there is some guidance and direction trickling down from the organizational level about the destination ahead and perhaps the expected way to get there, they are still mostly “in the dark” and without a map. Your disconnected department teams are all trying at the middle level, the “process” level, and at the bottom levels, the “procedural” levels, to get there, wherever “there” is, but they are basically all on their own as to “how” to do it; they are not all going in the same direction; they are not going about it the same way across departments.

At level 3, your Organization uses the systems in place to deal with change project initiatives. They have dealt with changes before and a lot of the same players are called on to make it happen again, usually functional managers and contact points in the normal process flows of regular business. These subject experts should definitely be informed and consulted but are not necessarily responsible or accountable for the project management work activities, unless they are actual project team members with assignments in that adjacent layer of the organization to operational work activities. Even if they are not part of the project team they should be closely involved as they are key stakeholders and will take on the continuance of the initiative if the project makes new processes operational.