Using Skore to Deliver the People Side of Change Management.
Are you implementing a new system, designing a new organisation or improving business processes? If so, you need the right people in the right place with the right skills or your efforts are likely to be wasted.
At Skore we’re passionate about making people the centre of everything related to process change. That’s why Skore has been simply designed to make people-led change a core part of process improvement. Whether you’re trying to build a case for change, get buy in, understand training needs and/or recruitment, there are a number of tools available to help you.
In this article we cover the following topics to show you how Skore’s simple software can help you deliver successful people-led change.
- Set clear objectives
- Get buy in early
- Roles and responsibilities (e.g. RACI / RATSI)
- Skills and competencies
- Job descriptions
- Org charts
- Make change stick (giving people confidence – landing pages and training aids)
Set Clear Objectives
Whatever change you’re making be clear about what you’re trying to achieve. Setting clear goals and objectives, that everyone understands, is key to ensuring you are aligned.
Having a clear objective from the start means that in a workshop or training session people understand why you are changing something. There will be a lot less resistance if individuals and the organisation understand why they need change in the first place.
Then translate them into the specific questions you’re trying to answer during investigation (discovery) and design workshops. A really effective way of doing this is to present a question that needs answeringin the workshop.
For example, if you are embarking on a software implementation project you need to define why the system is required and the high level benefits for the individuals involved. As part of your investigations you’ll run As-Is workshops (read more about As Is vs To Be here) to understand the current issues in the process.
This can be framed as a few questions such as:
- What things are slowing us down?
- What is preventing us from improving quality?
- What do we find frustrating?
Make this visible during the workshop to remind everyone what is important to focus on.
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Get Buy In Early
Setting clear objectives is one thing but helping individuals build their own case for change is essential to getting buy in. A brilliant way to do this is to involve them in the work as early as possible. This gives them a stake in the change, an understanding of how it will impact them individually, both good and bad.
The Skore process approach is powerfully simple, meaning that everyone can get involved in process discovery sessions and really understand what’s going on. A great way to ensure buy in. Everyone can work together to:
- Align on how things work today and what’s wrong with them
- Collectively identify opportunities for improvement
- Agree on the constraints that may impact success
A simple process captured in Skore
Create this process framework by involving the team. Then suddenly it’s not a group or consultants or analysts doing it to them, they all have a stake in what the potential solution will look like. The same framework is used for further communications as the project progresses and further changes are made. This ensures everyone is on the same page.
Roles & Responsibilities
Processes are essential for helping the team align around what happens, when and why. With Skore you also build a deep understanding of who is involved and to what extent. This is really important when you want to know whether you have the right roles to make your processes work as designed.
By default a Skore What box asks the question “Who does it?” and by enabling the Responsibilities model you can extend this using RACI, RATSI, RAPID, or your own preferred model (find out more about RACI alternatives here).
With this enabled you can tag the roles on each step of the process according to their responsibility level. If you are using RATSI, for example, you can tag the Responsible role with R, the Authority role with A, the Task role with T and so on. You can add as many roles to a What box as you like but remember that too many can make your process look complicated. (Tip: hide roles tagged with Support or Inform so they are not visible on the page but are still tagged against the process step.)
Multiple roles tagged with responsibility levels
Once you’ve added all your roles to the process go to Roles > Insights tab and you can immediately see how your roles stack up.
Roles > Insights tab showing responsibility levels across different roles
This view shows you how often each role has been tagged by each responsibility level. In RATSI the A (for Authority) shows who is responsible for key decisions. In this example you can see that the Marketing Director is the only role by design. Key decisions are kept to a minimum in this process and therefore as few people as possible need to have that authority. You may wish to represent lots of decisions, in which case you could use this view to ensure that no single role has to make all the decisions.
We see that the Marketing Manager has both a large amount of Responsibilities and Tasks. Therefore we would recommend reviewing that role to determine whether it actually needs to be divided into two or more new roles.
Whatever you do with the insights provided, you can change the process immediately and your change will be instantly reflected here. If you need to review individual roles use the Role Description on the main Roles tab.
Skills and Competencies
When changing a process, adding new activities, or creating a whole new process it’s likely there are going to be gaps in the skills and competencies of the existing team. Use Skore to identify these gaps and create job descriptions later on.
In Skore we ask what competencies are required for an individual piece of work without having to consider the role involved. By focusing on the activities we can objectively agree what the right competencies are required to deliver the desired outcomes.
Individual competencies attached to an activity
Here we can see competencies have been added to the activity using Custom Field attachments. This activity has two competencies associated with it. You would review each activity in the process and add competencies as required.
Now we can go to the Roles tab and this time we select the Competency tab. The Competency tab is automatically generated as soon as you start adding competencies to the process.
Roles by number of associated competencies
Here we can start to see how different competencies cluster around different roles. Fewer competencies generally means roles are much more specialised whereas large numbers of competencies indicate a more generalist role.
Again this view shows that the Marketing Manager has a large number of competencies compared with other roles so we can legitimately ask the question whether it’s feasible that one person could have such a broad skill set. This may be further evidence that the Marketing Manager role needs to be redesigned.
Note. This example does not include the minimum level of competency but this could be added to Skore if required.
Job Descriptions
With the information gathered so far it’s now possible to start creating accurate job descriptions. For this you will use the Role Manager in the Roles tab. The Role Manager lists all the roles in the process and shows how often they appear. Selecting a role will show you the detailed Role Description on the right hand side.
Role Manager View
The view above shows the role description for the Marketing Manager. Many roles will directly translate into a job description while other job descriptions may be made up of multiple roles. In the Marketing Manager example the description lists all the activities and their responsibility level.
The Custom Field section will show you the list of competencies that this role requires to carry out the activities it has been assigned. This should be the full list of competencies required for the job.
Competency list for the selected role
The Collaborators section tells you which other roles the Marketing Manager is working closely with. This is determined by how often each role appears on the same activity as the Marketing Manager. The higher the count the more they will interact.
Other roles that collaborate with this one
Finally you can see how this role interacts with others through handovers. This is another form of interaction where the role is passing over finished work to another part of the process, often outside of their team or department.
Handover view of the Marketing Manager
With this information it is now possible to create a job description that is directly connected to the work described by the process model.
Organisation Chart
The job descriptions created in the last step provide a basis for developing your org chart. They will give you a good sense of the level of responsibility, the level of skills and knowledge as well as the types of activity they are involved in. Assembling the org chart may require some work but is easily carried out in Skore using Note boxes and Icons.
Org Chart in Skore using Note boxes and Icons
Make Change Stick with People Led Change Management
Even after you assemble the team and start implementing your change things will still be new to everyone. Regardless of experience and skill level these are new ways of working and not everyone will remember everything from day one.
Set up training on the key process changes and any new technology. Using Skore, create User Manual versions of your new processes so that everyone has easy access to the new processes and any supporting material.
Processes need to be easy to find so that people aren’t left frustrated and not able to figure out how to do simple things. There will always be challenges during implementation but the aim is to make it as easy as possible.
Create landing pages in Skore that make it easy for people to find this information in a simple and friendly way. Landing pages are easy to make using images and links to the appropriate processes.
A simple landing page to make it easy for users to quickly access their processes
Add additional information to processes to make it as easy as possible for people to find the actual information they need. This could include links to documents, forms, policies, apps or even instructional videos.
Video tutorial embedded in a Skore attachment to support users through change
Finally you can use the collaboration features in Skore to gather issues in the process as users come across them. The Skore processes really become the communication medium between those doing the process and the support team helping them through the change.
Conclusion
Delivering change without spending enough time considering the impact on people is always going to be dangerous. Without the right people, and without getting them behind the change it’s unlikely to deliver the expected results. That’s why Skore has been designed to make it as easy as possible to engage with people and provide an unrivalled set of tools that allows you to align People, Process and Technology all in one view. Deliver change with your People on board and you’re on the route to success.