Hi, I’m Helen, welcome to my website on Change Management where you can find out about the basics, my thinking and how to contact me.

A structured approach to managing changes in a business or organisation.

With infinite ways to do this, it’s important to think through a structure that works for the scale of change, as well as the size and type of the environment that’s changing.

I’m a generalist which means I’ve worked across different industries, doing the same thing in different ways depending on what’s required.

Before this, I learnt about operational ways-of-working and what it means to develop and implement something new at the BBC (for 15 years).

It’s since been 9 years and I’ve been to as many different companies in that time, including Royal Mail, PRS for Music, Waitrose, Mars, Asahi and  Pets at Home.

Change Management reduces the risk of unknowns having a negative impact on your ability to deliver changes.

Any structured approach to managing change, regardless of labels or methodologies must include a focus on what is changing, why, who is impacted and how.

Understanding this enables you to put in place measures* to support the process of change, i.e. it provides a level of assurance that you are developing the right relationships and work* needed to successfully implement the changes.

* ‘Measures’ and ‘work’ are such ambiguous terms, aren’t they?

By ‘measures’, I mean something you can quantify and assess- e.g. if you’ve identified who your important stakeholders are and you assign someone involved in delivering the changes to manage the relationship with them, you can then know (and measure) how all the relationships needed are being managed. You can feel assured that the stakeholders are being communicated with and that their views are being fed back into how the changes are being implemented.

By ‘work’, I mean pieces of work, tasks or actions that can be easily defined and tracked through to completion.

Both these will differ greatly depending on the organisation and environment. The important thing is that they are articulated in a way that makes sense to the people involved (those delivering the changes and their stakeholders).