Spear believes strongly in using professional change management practitioners throughout its engagements to ensure that initiatives are not just technically successful but are implemented by the business in a way that achieves the desired benefits and minimises negative operational impacts.

Change managers bring a distinct and complementary skill set to those of our project managers. Taking an end user or customer perspective, they work closely with business analysts to form a detailed view of how each initiative will affect people in the client’s organisation – in terms of changes to team structure, individual responsibilities, cultural, behavioural and competency requirements.

They use this understanding to plan activities which build support for and commitment to the change and prepare impacted groups to adopt it, whilst minimizing disruption to business as usual operations.

Typically these activities include:

• Identification, assessment and management of stakeholders
• Determination of change impacts
• Alignment of business leadership and support
• Analysis of communication and engagement requirements, planning, preparation of materials
• Management of ‘people-side’ issues and risks
• Assessment and monitoring of change resistance
• Definition of new organisational operating model components
• Preparation and delivery of training / education materials
• Assessment of stakeholder change readiness
• Development of implementation support mechanisms