What is Enterprise Change Management?

Among the many realities for modern organisations is that change is a constant heartbeat that propels them forward. Organisations undergoing digital transformations, responding to market shifts, making structural changes or accommodating a strategic pivot, need to be able adapt. How an enterprise responds to change will increasingly be a major factor that determines its success. So how do leaders and change practitioners steer their organisations, teams and colleagues through the complexity of enterprise change? We explore both art and science of managing change as we take a look at how enterprise change management empowers teams to create the future with confidence and purpose.

Enterprise Change Management (ECM) is a structured approach to managing change across an entire organisation. Unlike project-level change management, which focuses on specific projects or initiatives, ECM encompasses all aspects of change within an organisation. It ensures that changes are implemented smoothly and successfully, minimising disruption and maximising benefits.

Focuses on managing change related to, or within, a specific project. It involves planning, implementing, and monitoring changes to help ensure the solutions delivered by the project will ultimately be adopted.

Involves managing change across the entire organisation. This includes aligning change initiatives with the organisation’s strategic goals, ensuring consistency, and fostering a broad culture of change readiness.

Implementing ECM is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, it aligns change initiatives with strategic goals, ensuring that all efforts support the organisation’s long-term objectives and are consistent with each other.

Next it provides a standard approach to managing change, reducing confusion and increasing efficiency. This then enables employees to be involved and engaged in familiar, accessible and approachable change processes, increasing buy-in and reducing resistance.

Fourthly, an enterprise approach to change works with organisational risk management, identifying and mitigating risks associated with individual changes and entire change programs, ensuring smoother transitions.

Finally, enterprise change management ensures that changes are sustainable and integrated into the organisation’s culture and operations through the implied – if not overt – organisational support of an enterprise-wide approach.

The components of ECM are unsurprisingly like those of sound change management everywhere. Change in most contexts benefits from strong leadership to drive change and secure necessary resources, a dedicated team to plan, implement, and monitor change initiatives, clear and consistent communication to keep all stakeholders informed and engaged, capability uplift that provides employees with the skills and knowledge needed to adapt to change, and monitoring progress and gathering feedback to make necessary adjustments.

In an enterprise-wide model of change, the team to plan, implement and monitor change initiatives, and the build of capability are particularly strengthened. Being a model that surrounds and sustains individual projects by ‘wrapping’ them into an organisation-wide view, ECM enables that aspect of change that is sometimes missing in other approaches: growth of the change capability itself.

Digital tools to organise change management at an enterprise level are currently burgeoning, and organisations will soon be spoiled for choice. Two key call outs to support effective ECM involve firstly ensuring the enterprise digital tooling supports the change management processes and culture of the organisation; and second that the chosen digital tools can produce an enterprise view of change (EVOC).

Beyond digital tools, there will be a number of key change management processes common to most organisations undertaking enterprise wide change:

• Change impacts are the core of sound change management. Enterprises will commonly have an approach to Change Impact Assessment that evaluates the potential impact of changes on the organisation, in particular the people impacts.
• Stakeholder Analysis processes identify and enable understanding of the needs and concerns of stakeholders.
• Change Readiness Assessments exist either to:
  a) assess the organisation’s readiness for change on a broader scale or
  b) assess the readiness of the organisation to adopt a specific change being delivered by Project-Level Change Management.
• Communication tools are essential in change and it’s highly recommended to identify and use various channels to communicate change initiatives, ensuring the channels are relevant to the impacted audiences.
• Training Programs will be in place to help employees adapt to new processes and systems.
• And finally, Feedback Mechanisms are highly effective ways to understand the effectiveness of, and improve, the change process. Feedback is especially important in ECM as it enables the long term capability growth at the heart of the enterprise-wide approach.

Implementing ECM is a change in itself. Organisations that currently operate Project-Level Change Management will have many components in place, but there will still be a necessary process of connecting projects up together into a cohesive whole. Implementation of any change in an organisation involves several steps, and implementing improved change management capability should be no different.

Teams implementing ECM should endeavour to:

1. Assess the Current and Future State: Understand the organisation’s current state and identify areas for improvement, gaps or people impacts as it moves towards implementing ECM.
2. Define a Shared Vision: Clearly articulate the vision for the future state and how it aligns with the organisation’s strategic goals. Seek alignment on the vision among key stakeholders.
3. Develop a Change Management Plan: Create a detailed plan outlining the steps, resources, and timelines for implementing change, ensuring impacts and risks are understood and have been planned for.
4. Engage Impacted groups: Involve people impacted by the implementation to gain their support and address their concerns. Even though these people may include change practitioners, they may still need support to let go of siloed ways of working and adopt an enterprise-wide approach.
5. Communicate Effectively: Use clear and consistent communication to keep everyone informed and engaged.
6. Provide Training and Support: Offer training and support to help employees adapt to change.
7. Monitor and Adjust: Continuously monitor progress and make necessary adjustments to ensure successful implementation. Ideally, change implementations source and monitor metrics that can be used to objectively describe the progress of change.

Implementing Enterprise Change Management can be challenging. Each organisational culture will be unique as to how the challenges present, but there are some common challenges and potential solutions to be aware of.

ECM introduces a layer of visibility and governance that may initially come across as over-governing and engender resistance. Address resistance by involving stakeholders and impacted groups in the change process and addressing their concerns.

Implementing Enterprise Change Management is one of those changes that require strong leadership support. Driving Project-Level change in organisations can be challenging. But by comparison to implementing ECM, Project-Level change is relatively self-contained in terms of impact. Implementing a system to manage change across the entire organisation will require leadership dedication and the commitment of necessary resources.

Depending on the resistance platforms that may emerge, clear and consistent communication will be essential to prevent roadblocks from occurring. Clear communication keeps everyone informed and engaged. 

Training programs can be expensive, but organisations that attempt to implement change without training discover that it is more expensive not to train. Providing comprehensive training to help the enterprise adapt to the new ECM processes and systems will ensure a far smoother implementation.

There are many innovative ways to resource change implementations including rapid resource models available from Agencia Change and other change management consultancies. The only way to unravel the web of issues caused by insufficient resourcing is to plan for and allocate sufficient resources to support the change process.

Enterprise Change Management is an essential tool for modern organisations to understand the complexity of their many and various changes. By aligning change initiatives with strategic goals, engaging employees, and providing the necessary support, organisations can build a change-ready culture that adapts to change positively and continues to do better as change capability grows over time. Implementing ECM ensures that individual changes are sustainable and integrated into the organisation’s operations, and that change more broadly is welcomed into the organisation as a catalyst for growth.

Building a change-ready organisation that succeeds at enterprise change management requires commitment, strong leadership, and a structured approach.