Brief

Our client is one of Australia’s largest automotive finance and insurance providers – they manage a portfolio of projects with an annual investment of more than 100 million and were rolling out various strategic initiatives to maintain and grow their position in the market. Part of their ongoing business improvement strategy was to increase the effectiveness of project delivery by incorporating strong change management practices into their project management operating model.

Having successfully implemented a project governance and delivery framework the previous year, they were looking to increase their change maturity by establishing a change framework that would be embraced by both stakeholders in the project community as well as the operational business units.

With inconsistent practices and varying levels of change experience, this meant ensuring that staff understood the value of the change management and how they would benefit from the activities performed by change managers as part of the project. There was a reasonable level of change management capability ‘in house’ and knowledge was regularly supplemented by external providers introducing new methods and tools, however, these techniques were being applied to projects in an inconsistent and ad-hoc way.

Solution

Blue Seed Consulting’s approach was to:

• Assess the needs of the organisation
• Build a tailored Change Management Framework
• Deploy it to the project community and stakeholders across the business.

After deeply assessing the needs of the organisation, it was clear that the framework had to be really engaging and deliver tangible value in every one of its components.  If it wasn’t it would be perceived as onerous and circumvented.

We consulted widely with the executive team, project staff, and leaders across the business. From this research, we deduced the best solution was an activity-based framework. This was supported by tools and templates to capture the activity outcomes and manage the information effectively.

This approach ensured the purpose and value of each activity were clearly defined to facilitators and participants in the project team. Furthermore, the approach allowed for the framework to be applied to both the smallest and largest of change initiatives in the business.

Blue Seed established a ‘change community’ to help define the framework, contribute ideas, and sign off on the activities and tools. This helped keep delivery resources engaged and supportive of the new framework, leveraging their experience within the organisation and educating them on the framework at the same time so we ended up with a fit for purpose outcome.

Blue Seed maintained the engagement of the executive team, senior leaders, and other related stakeholders, by delivering a series of education sessions to raise awareness of the ‘change framework’ and illustrate the value it would give them in fulfilling their roles.

Results

A versatile framework sets the standard for efficient business-wide change management initiatives

Blue Seed created a versatile, scalable, change management framework that provided guidance and efficiency with prepopulated templates. It was successfully deployed to support change initiatives across the organisation. Blue Seed left behind a community of ‘change agents’ throughout the business to own and continuously improve the framework, share their experiences and the lessons learned. Furthermore, consistency in change activities and terminology helped improve efficiency and common understanding of the value of great change management across all business stakeholders.