Organisational merger learnings: Developing a consolidated change management approach

With the recent merge of two State Government Departments, the need to develop a consolidated approach to managing the significanlty higher rate and scale of change was clear.

Challenge

It was recognised that in order for the newly formed Department to effectively navigate current and future change, an end-to-end change management approach that consolidated the methodology, tools and resources from each of the previous Departments was critical. It was important that the change road map offered a seamless change management approach that met the needs of the newly formed organisational structure and clearly articulated the change steps, how these steps can be achieved and who was accountable to action these.  A key focus in developing the change road map was to map HR service offerings and change support to the business at each change step.

Our Approach

Curve Group partnered with the Department to design an end-to-end change management roadmap, key activities included:

• A thorough review of existing internal documentation.
• Key stakeholder interviews across the P&C function to ensure the developed road map reflected best practice and enabled various groups requiring change support to access relevant services in a coordinated and integrated way.
•  A recommendations report detailing the change road map.
• Project Directorate testing points to pull together critical stakeholder inputs and ensure the roadmap addressed the key challenges to manage change across the Department.
• Validation workshop to test and validate change roadmap steps and to facilitate thinking and decision making around ownership and accountabilities across each change step.
• Based on a review, a selection of existing change tools and resources were recommended for continued use and mapped across the finalised change steps.

Outcome

Key outcomes included:

• Clarity around available changes tools and support resources
• A clear articulation of ‘what’ each change step involves
• A clear articulation of the change step inputs and outputs
• Specification of business owners as well as the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of P&C support across each of the change steps.

Curve Group have continued their partnership with the Department to begin building out a high-level implementation plan to support the effective roll out of the consolidated change road map.

If you’d like to find out more about this case study or our services in change please contactus@www.curvegroup.com