Commissioning: Change management
Richard Selwyn
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Delivering effective change programmes means being able to identify and solve problems you encounter, says Richard Selwyn,
When Daniel Defoe said the only certainties in life are death and taxes he should have added public sector change programmes. Whether it is a simple re-structure, implementing the latest service model, or culture and organisational development, we all have first-hand experience of change.
In public services, 70 per cent of change programmes fail to deliver the benefits envisaged at the start. This is where the idea of dynamic change management is a practical improvement on the ordinary Kotter, Kubler-Ross and Deming models. For example, dynamic change management helps us understand that the route envisaged will not be the one followed - it will have ups and downs. When people get involved with your programme, they will react emotionally and force you to modify the aims, so what looked like a technical problem turns out to be complex, with feedback loops and opposing priorities.
One of the projects I worked on was a large children's services transformation where we needed to change quickly, but also bring the many staff and partners with us. Initial efforts to involve people in the change were met with resistance. We set up stakeholder groups and gave them genuine ownership of the changes - testing out commissioning questions in the mixed groups. We also set a clear vision and included emotional messages - partly to recognise the personal change that staff experience but also to show the potential benefit for children and families' outcomes.
The actions we took were based on analysis using the Department for Education's Change Jigsaw tool (see graphic). This helps to design the core change activities in advance, and then identify what is going wrong and how to fix it.
Next time you find yourself in a challenging change programme, remember tools such as the Change Management Jigsaw can help navigate the twists and turns of the journey.
Richard Selwyn is a member of the Association of Directors of Children's Services resources and sustainability policy committee
@rjselwyn