Change management

Effectively managing organisational change involves following a sequence of clear, defined steps. Start by assessing changes in your business environment. Then plan and prepare adjustments, implement the changes, and ensure they last.

Key steps in the change management process

Follow these steps for effective change implementation and adapt them, if necessary, to your project's scale:

1. Identify change - understand the problem and what is needed to fix it.
2. Analyse change - check feasibility, time and costs required.
3. Evaluate change - weigh up the benefits and costs and decide if it's worth it.
4. Plan change - assess impact, communicate benefits and create a timeline.
5. Implement change - train staff, assign tasks and roll out the schedule of changes.
6. Sustain change - measure results, review the project and embed changes.

These steps should help you transition individuals, teams and organisations to a desired future state. For more tips, see what is change management.

Implementing change in business

Implementation is at the heart of the change management process and often includes:

• communicating the benefits of the change to your employees
• training staff on the appropriate changes
• removing resistance or obstacles to change
• securing organisation-wide buy-in for the change
• coordinating transformative activities to move the business into a new way of working

As every change is different, you may find that you need to organise tasks and responsibilities in the process differently. You may also need to carry out other activities specific to your situation or apply different change management models to manage the process successfully.

Managing change in projects

Change management works alongside project management. You can use established change control systems to handle updates in the project's:

• scope - for example, when a customer asks for additions
• cost - including price changes for project items
• schedule - for example, delays to reaching milestones
• contract - for example, shifts in customer-supplier terms 

Many project managers apply integrated change management to assess and approve changes within the project systematically.