Background and Challenges
Trueman Change worked with Haringey London Borough Council to build their capacity to do change well, ensuring successful change programme delivery and a positive change management process.
Exiting the first COVID-19 lockdown in the summer of 2020, the Council was experiencing significant financial pressures alongside complex partnership working and a pre-existing transformation programme. Change activity was multi layered and as a result there was a sense of ‘chaotic urgent action’ within the organisation’s change agenda. Project management support was in place but without change methodology expertise.
The Council objective was to gain oversight of the many change activities, to take stock following the impact of COVID-19, and to understand how the many different change projects were impacting staff and partners.
Trueman Change were commissioned to provide the Council with an understanding of their existing change management competency and make clear, practical recommendations for how the Council could manage change in a more positive, impactful way.
Trueman Change Involvement
Trueman Change provided an evaluation of the Council’s change competency, pulling out key themes occurring across the change programme and specific, practical recommendations for improvement.We worked with a range of participants, including teachers, pupils, school leaders and project staff to gather both qualitative and quantitative data.
The diagnostic process included:
- Conversations with senior leaders in the organisation to understand the priorities, challenges and language of the organisation.
- Project Management document review to understand how change management methodology could add to existing project management structure around the change programme.
- Change Diagnostic Survey conducted across staff and partners looking at areas such as leadership, culture, capacity, discipline and sustainability. Survey responses were submitted anonymously but divided into categories for example to separate those directly involved in a change project for rich and insightful data. The survey was also customised to include some organisation specific questions that leadership wanted feedback on.
- Additional interviews were held with key stakeholders including workshops with those not directly involved in the change projects to ascertain how well understood the changes and their future impact was.
- The data and feedback was analysed and key themes identified to present back in a final report with practical recommendations for implementation.
Outcomes and Solutions
Eight themes were identified as a result of the feedback and insights gathered with specific recommendations and actions identified for the Council. Themes covered areas such as clarity of communications, how individual change activities sit within the bigger picture, the pace of change and impact of partnership working.
Alongside the actions that have come from the eight themes the work also led the Borough Council make improvements through:
- A decisive review of change activity determining what change was absolutely necessary and when was the right time for those changes to take place. This both reduced the overwhelm of change activity volume and provided the oversight for greater clarity, communication and management of change going forward.
- Change Diagnostic Survey conducted across staff and partners looking at areas such as leadership, culture, capacity, discipline and sustainability. Survey responses were submitted anonymously but divided into categories for example to separate those directly involved in a change project for rich and insightful data. The survey was also customised to include some organisation specific questions that leadership wanted feedback on.
- Increased support to middle management through the creation of dedicated support forums and training.
- Training for project managers in change management methodology to instil change management discipline within the organisation.
- A new communications strategy that better clarified in practical, real terms ‘what will be different’ for staff as a result of change activities.
