Stage 1 Review
The environmental factors and politics of an economic recession impact on how smoothly change management campaigns go. Whether a private company or a public institution, stress and uncertainty become a challenge for project management. In my case however there was a lot of novelty and energy from some of the departments who provided internal support services (accounting, comms and marketing, legal, customer services and the techies), however even those relationships can come under stress and comuniction issues need to be able to be quickly pulled in.
Our first review revealed a few “spanners in the works” so to speak. With any amalgamation program involving disparate processes and systems and most importantly team cultures probably the best thing to come out of scoping this review is that there will be lessons learned that will save a lot of time and money in subsequent campaigns. To give some context to the review, this project involved amalgamating 7 sets of policies and processes to engage a particular segment of our citizenry (about 100,000 people) in fulfilling its obligations that had been occurring in the community for many years without more than minor deviations from previous years.
The next part of this post is adapted from a section I wrote in the campaign debrief report. Where context is required to understand the learning I have included annotations in italics and our future plans as corporate policies develop and the toolkit available to our site expands..
| Publish good quality documents and tell the world about them | we began immediately process mapping so that stakeholders could slot in to our business and the campaign as an integral compenet of our internal comms plan |
| Monitor resource usage by content publishers and audience | Culture change is required to get content publishers and targeted audiences to use Intranet resources. Luckily there are good automated reporting tools available to make this easy |
| Get a Comms plan, get it approved at the highest levels and ensure the message delivery protocols are robust | The suitability of our SharePoint team site for improving communications wasn’t acknowledged until we started reviewing things that went wrong |
| Publish project lists (e.g. issues, risks and project schedule) | Moderating functions allow project managers to give stakeholders access without loosing control. Attaching work-flows can facilitate improved performance against project deliverables |
There is great potential for business silos to be interconnected to improve cohesion and integration. As well as having impassioned business units who actively engage with technologies like SharePoint you also need the support framework and the enterprise policies to help develop a conducive culture.
This review is purely looking at the effectiveness of the team site to deliver a communication platform for change management. Some of the things we had already put in to place before we finsihed with the review
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