Case Study: Organizational Change Management within the Financial Services Industry

Change Management, as a practice, can often be overlooked for the sake of delivering an output quickly or within a cost constraint. However, the change manager role is essential in considering the people-aspects of project delivery. When people, process or technology changes are made, especially those changes that alter existing ways of working (which includes all 3), it’s important to maintain employee and stakeholder engagement. Those impacted should be involved from start to finish instead of solely being a recipient of something taking place, thereby reducing common resistance to change.

A change manager was embedded into the portfolio team from MIGSO-PCUBED to prepare the division for change, manage the change and support embedding activities to increase adoption. Their focus, allowing the benefits of the transformation program to be realized.

Our organizational change consultant worked closely with the project team and business stakeholders to understand the scope of the change, including who it was affecting (stakeholder identification), and the timescales for when impacts would take place (impact assessments). Change plans were then developed specifically for each package of work. Each tailored change plan included not only the necessary preparation activities, like impact assessment and stakeholder identification highlighted above, but also relevant communications and training, and activities to embed and sustain the changes afterward. The team identified the purpose of the proposed changes and how it would alter people’s existing activities. That information was then fed back into the communications and training to promote efficient adoption of the change.

In total, all required activities to support each change were considered and planned before the project delivered the outcome. The individual change plans then rolled up into a portfolio-wide view of activity which enabled better conversations with business stakeholders.

Over the duration of the engagement, key Change Management interventions in support the Transformation Programme included:

• Developing tailored change plans to identify key activities and levels of engagement required across workstreams
• Managing communication and engagement plans to address the how, who, when and why for each initiative
• Identifying and analysing stakeholder groups affected by changes, and applying relevant impact assessments
• Working with the business to develop interventions to manage impacts
• Conducting a training needs analysis, and identified suppliers to transfer skills
• Setting up and managing surveys and feedback loops between the programme and business