Target Your Approach with a Change Assessment

For many project teams, conducting a change assessment is an eye-opening exercise which helps them chart a new course for the project they are working on. At a minimum, the assessment provides the team with an opportunity to confront and deal with current habits, beliefs and practices around the cultural aspects of change.

Tool description

Emergent’s change assessment tool provides a graphic representation of the degree to which each phase of the change process has been addressed. This tool helps the project team to focus on the most critical organizational change needs and opportunities.

At the beginning of a project, the change assessment can help to:

• Assess the overall change capability of the organization or team
• Identify change improvement opportunities in the organization and determine how to pursue them
• Develop an initial baseline for the team’s change capabilities

During the later phases of a project, the change assessment can be useful in:

• Identifying areas the team should focus on improving and determining how to do so
• Tracking changes in the team’s change capabilities throughout an initiative

When to use it

The best time to use this tool is during the project team’s start-up phase, as it will help orient team members to the change-related implications of their project. As part of the ongoing assessment of a team’s capabilities, it should be applied at key project milestones. Best practice is to use it at regular intervals to keep the team focused on the change effort.

How to use it

1. Have each team member review and rate the questions for each of the phases.
2. Capture the team’s ratings for each phase, preferably by getting consensus on the scores for each phase rather than by calculating a mean or median. Discuss the reasons behind the variances between the highest and lowest rating for each phase.
3. Plot the score for each phase on the change assessment.
4. Analyze the results, using the discussion questions.
5. Develop a plan of action for addressing those phases which need attention at this time.

>> Click here to download the Change Assessment tool

If you like this tool, you can find 60 more organizational change management tools like it in Change Accelerator.