When a companys organizational design changes effective managers should also anticipate doing which of the following?

Over the years, Prosci clients and research participants have shared valuable insights about their roles and responsibilities in change management, along with the qualifications and skills that helped pave the way for their successful careers. Although job titles and roles in the change management discipline vary widely based on the unique organization and its needs around change, this job description for a Change Manager offers a high-level view of a generalist role.

Position Description for a Change Manager

A change manager plays a key role in ensuring that organizational projects and initiatives meet objectives on time and on budget by increasing employee adoption and usage. This person focuses on the people side of change, which involves preparing, supporting and equipping people to adopt and use changes to business processes, systems and technology, job roles, organization structures, and more.

The primary responsibility of an organizational change manager is to develop and implement change management strategies and plans that maximize employee adoption and usage of required changes. These responsibilities also include plans and efforts to anticipate and minimize resistant behaviors from employees and stakeholders who are impacted by the changes.

The change manager's goal is to drive faster adoption, higher ultimate utilization of changes, and proficiency with the changes that impact employees who must use the changes in their daily work. These improvements increase benefit realization, value creation, ROI, and the achievement of results and outcomes.

While the change manager may or may not have supervisory responsibility, they must work with and through many others in the organization to succeed. Acting as a coach for senior leaders and executives, the change manager helps them fulfill the critical role of change management sponsor. The change manager may support and coach people managers and supervisors as they help their teams through their transitions. Similarly, the change manager supports project managers and project teams to integrate change management activities with their project plans.

Roles and responsibilities of a change manager

The change manager will:

• Apply a structured methodology and lead change management activities
  Leverage a change management methodology, process and tools to create a strategy to support adoption of the changes required by a project or initiative.

• Support communication efforts
  Enable the design, development, delivery and management of key communications.

• Assess the change impact
  Conduct impact analyses, assess change readiness, and identify key stakeholders.

• Support training efforts
  Provide input, document requirements, and support the design and delivery of training programs.

Additional responsibilities:

• Complete change management assessments
• Identify, analyze and prepare risk mitigation tactics
• Identify and manage anticipated and persistent resistance
• Consult and coach project teams
• Create actionable deliverables for the core change management plans: Sponsor Plan, People Manager Plan, Communications Plan, and Training Plan
• Create actionable deliverables for any required "Extend" plans, such as the Resistance Management Plan
• Support and engage senior leaders
• Coach people managers and supervisors
• Support organizational design and definition of roles and responsibilities
• Coordinate efforts with other specialists
• Integrate change management activities into the project plan
• Evaluate and ensure user readiness
• Manage stakeholders
• Track and report issues
• Define and measure success metrics and monitor change progress
• Support change management at the organizational level
• Manage the change portfolio

Skills and qualifications of a change manager

• A solid understanding of how people go through a change and the change process
• Experience with and knowledge of change management principles, methodologies and tools
• Exceptional communication skills, both written and verbal
• Excellent active listening skills
• Ability to clearly articulate messages to a variety of audiences
• Ability to establish and maintain strong relationships
• Ability to influence others and move toward a common vision or goal
• Flexible and adaptable; able to work in ambiguous situations
• Resilient and tenacious with a propensity to persevere
• Forward looking with a holistic approach
• Organized with a natural inclination for planning strategy and tactics
• Problem solving and root-cause identification skills
• Able to work effectively at all levels of an organization
• Must be a team player and able to work collaboratively with and through others
• Acute business acumen and understanding of organizational issues and challenges
• Familiarity with project management approaches, tools and phases of the project lifecycle
• Experience with large-scale organizational change efforts
• Change management certification or designation desired

Alternative Titles for a Change Manager

There are many titles for a person in charge of employee adoption and usage. A change manager might also be called a change management:

• Advisor
• Analyst
• Consultant
• Coordinator
• Facilitator
• Lead
• Manager
• Practitioner
• Specialist

Other titles for a change manager or professional in a change management career include:

• Business readiness lead
• Organizational readiness analyst
• Organization adoption lead
• Implementation specialist
• Business transition analyst
• Business transformation manager
• Benefit realization manager
• Change realization lead
• Strategy realization analyst

The Change Manager Role

Every organization has specific needs and may even combine change management responsibilities with other roles, such as project management. Whether you're planning for a new role in your organization or investigating change management as a potential career, this change management job description demonstrates the typical skills, roles and responsibilities necessary for success as a generalist in the discipline. 

Although it is sometimes called the soft side of change, managing the people side of a change is often the most challenging and critical component of an organizational transformation.

Consider a merger or acquisition. The technical side of the change is certainly complex. You must work out the financial arrangements of the deal, integrate business systems, make decisions about the new organization's structure, and more. But getting people on board and participating in the merger or acquisition can make the difference between success and failure.

Why? Individuals will need to perform their jobs differently. The degree to which they change their behaviors and adopt new processes has a significant impact on the initiative. This is why the soft side of change can be the harder side of change. Fortunately, you can apply a structured approach to managing the people side of change and make a big impact on overall success.

Change Management Starter Bundle: Start applying change management
to your projects and initiatives today with free resources from Prosci. 

The People Side of Change

Change management addresses the people side of change. Creating a new organization, designing new work processes, and implementing new technologies may never see their full potential if you don't bring your people along. That's because financial success depends on how thoroughly individuals in the organization embrace the change.

Change management is the application of a structured process and set of tools for leading the people side of change to achieve a desired outcome. Ultimately, change management focuses on how to help people engage, adopt and use a change in their day-to-day work.

When defining change management, we recognize it as both a process and a competency. 

Change Management as a Process

The change management process enables practitioners within organizations to leverage and scale the change management activities that help impacted individuals and groups move through their transitions. The Prosci Methodology includes a robust, research-based process called the Prosci 3-Phase Process:

During Phase 1 – Prepare Approach, we ask and answer:

• What are we trying to achieve?
• Who has to do their jobs differently and how?
• What will it take to achieve success?

During Phase 2 – Manage Change, we ask and answer:

• What will we do to prepare, support and engage people?
• How are we doing?
• What adjustments do we need to make?

And during Phase 3 – Sustain Outcomes, we ask and answer:

• Now, where are we? Are we done yet?
• What is needed to ensure the change sticks?
• Who will assume ownership and sustain outcomes?

Change Management as a Competency 

At the organizational level, change management is a leadership competency for enabling change within an organization. It is also a strategic capability designed to increase the change capacity and responsiveness of the organization. 

For senior leaders, change management competency means being able to lead change for the organization, including being an effective sponsor of change and demonstrating commitment to the change, both individually and organizationally. For people managers working with front-line employees, competency relates to effectively coaching direct reports through their change journeys. Although competency varies according your relationship to change, organizations are more effective and successful when they build change management competencies throughout their ranks.

Change management is not just communication and training. Nor is it simply managing resistance. Effective change management follows a structured process and employs a holistic set of tools to drive successful individual and organizational change.

Why Do We Need Change Management?

There are numerous reasons to employ effective change management on both large- and small-scale efforts. Here are three main reasons:

Organizational change happens one person at a time

It is easy to think about change only from an organizational perspective. When you consider a merger or acquisition, you might focus on financial structuring, data and systems integration, and physical location changes. However, organizational change of any kind occurs one person at a time. That is because an organization-wide change only occurs when Andre, Becky, Carlos and Dharma do their jobs differently.

Organizations don’t change, people do. It is the cumulative impact of successful individual change that brings about successful organizational change. If individuals don’t make changes to their day-to-day work, an organizational transformation effort will not deliver results.

Ignoring the people side of change is costly

Poorly managing or ignoring the people side of change has many consequences:

• Productivity declines on a larger scale for a longer duration than necessary
• Managers are unwilling to devote time or resources needed to support the change
• Key stakeholders do not show up to meetings
• Suppliers begin to feel the impact and see the disruption caused by change
• Customers feel negative impacts of a change that should have been invisible to them
• Employee morale suffers and divisions between “us” and “them” begin to emerge 
• Stress, confusion and fatigue increase
• Valued employees leave the organization

Projects also suffer from missed deadlines, budget overruns, rework and even abandonment. These consequences have tangible impacts on project health and the organization. Fortunately, you can mitigate these issues when you deploy a structured approach to the people side of change.

Change management increases the likelihood success

A growing body of data shows the impact effective change management has on the probability of a project meeting objectives. Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management benchmarking studies revealed that 93% of participants with excellent change management met or exceeded objectives, while only 15% of those with poor change management met or exceeded objectives.

In other words, projects with excellent change management were six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. What may be most enlightening about the research is that poor change management correlates with better success than applying none at all.

Prosci research even shows a direct correlation between effective change management and staying on schedule and on budget.

Individual vs. Organizational Change Management

Effectively managing change requires two perspectives: an individual perspective and an organizational perspective.

Individual Change Management

The individual perspective is an understanding of how people experience change. Prosci’s ADKAR Model describes successful change when an individual has:

If an individual gets stuck on a building block and cannot progress sequentially through the model, the change will not be as successful. The goal in leading the people side of change is ensuring that individuals have Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement.

Organizational Change Management

The organizational perspective of change management is the process and activities that project teams use to support successful individual change. If the ADKAR Model describes what an individual needs to make a change successfully, organizational change management is the set of actions to help build Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement across the organization. The Prosci Methodology is based on more than two decades of research and includes assessments and strategy to support targeted change management plans: 

• Master Change Management Plan
• ADKAR Blueprint
• Core Plans
  • Role-based plans
    • Sponsor Plan
    • People Manager Plan
  • Activity Plans
    • Communications Plan
    • Training Plan
• Extend Plans, as required

Change Management Roles

The change practitioner is like the director of the play working behind the scenes to enable actors on the stage. As a change enabler, the practitioner works to develop the change management strategy and plans while supporting and equipping senior leaders and people managers to fulfill their unique, employee-facing roles. 

For example, research shows that employees prefer to receive organizational messages about change from leaders at the top of their organization. And they prefer to receive messages about the change's impact on their day-to-day work from their immediate supervisor.

The practitioner's job is to enable key leaders and people managers to perform these and other employee-facing roles effectively. During times of change, the effectiveness of senior leaders and people managers in these critical roles will determine whether a project or initiative succeeds or fails.

How You Can Effect Successful Change

What can you do to become a more effective change leader? Begin applying change management on your projects and build change management competencies in your organization. These are the first steps to ensuring projects deliver their intended results.

The people side of change is not the soft side of change, it is the harder side of change. Investing the time and energy to manage the people side of your organizational efforts pays off in the end in terms of your effort's success and avoiding the numerous costs that plague poorly managed change.