Change management initiatives aim to facilitate a smooth transition to a predefined future state.
The success measures for change management often get lumped together and confused with measures associated with project delivery and benefit realisation. Effective measurement of change management success should focus human transition, separate from project and benefit realisation metrics.
Project, Change & Benefit Realisation Measures; What's the difference?
- Change Management Success deals with measuring human factors that contribute to how employees in a business have (or have not) transitioned to performing new ways of working in the future state.
- Project Success is measured by the delivery of a solution on time and on budget. More sophisticated measures look at how well the solution meets the business requirements.
- Benefit Realisation Measures are focused on assessing if an organisation has achieved the business outcomes related to a project or measuring the return on project investment.
If you were to look a time continuum of measurement across all three, project success can be measured first, followed by change management and finally benefit realisation.
Change Management Success Measures
Below are the key measures for evaluating change management success.
1. Engagement & Sentiment Measures
- Surveys, Focus Groups, Interviews are common feedback mechanisms for measuring employee engagement and sentiment following the delivery of change programs. To assess Change Management success, these measures can be more effective when compared against baseline measures or averages from previous programs.
2. Capability Development Measures
- Training Completion is the most fundamental measure of the new knowledge and skills developed as part of a change management program.
- Knowledge Testing measures how well employees retain and understand training content over time can be used to provide a deeper measure of capability development.
3. Adoption Measures
- Speed to Adoption refers to tracking how quickly employees adopt new ways of working. This is arguably the most important measure of change management success. While speed to adoption is a measure of time, measuring the quality of performance of new ways of working should also be considered.
- Benefit Critical Adoption is where new ways of working are prioritised and is a refined approach to measuring adoption. This involves measuring the adoption rates of the critical few new ways of working that are most closely linked to benefit realisation targets.
- System Utilisation is a common quantitative approach to measuring technology adoption that leverages software usage data including login rates and feature utilisation.
- Behaviour Observation is achieved by measuring the application of new ways of working through the observation of daily tasks. This is an alternative way to measure adoption and while more labour intensive, provides insights into performance timing, consistency and quality.
4. Audit
- Audits of compliance, safety and procedural adherence is often used to ensure consistent application of policies and standards. Audits can provide another data point to measure change management success. These audits are most commonly used when an organisation must meet regulatory requirements.
5. Employee Satisfaction
- Employee Satisfaction Surveys scores help gauge employee morale, general engagement and wellbeing and can be used as a data point to measure general change management effectiveness (rather than project specific change management effectiveness).
6. Culture Analysis
- Culture Mapping aims to identify shifts in mindsets, accepted behaviours and rituals across organisations that result from change programs. These measures can be used to evaluate the change management success of programs where cultural change objectives have been predefined.
Summary
Evaluating change management success requires a nuanced approach and best practice is to draw on multiple measures to gain a clear picture of how employees in a business have (or have not) transitioned to performing new ways of working in the future state. While project success on solution delivery time and cost related measures and benefit realisation measures organisational outcomes, change management success evaluates human factors.
