UCOP Organizational Change Management Guide & Resources

Organizational Change Management is the process of effectively supporting projects which will significantly change the way work gets done within an organization.  It requires understanding key stakeholder’s needs and perspectives, creating, and communicating a compelling vision, collaborating with others, measuring effectiveness, and effective planning and execution. UCOP is continuously adapting to the changing needs of our stakeholders and current best practices, therefore we have established a Change Management framework and set of resources specific to UCOP to help professionals effectively manage these changes.

UCOP’s Change Management Framework contains 6 critical workstreams that streamline any change management project.  These workstreams are based on and aligned to the best practice works of John Kotter and his “8 Accelerators of Change.” The below framework and resources have a proven track record of success having been utilized in over 19 changes projects across multiple functions with UCOP.

OCM Project Workstreams

Description

1. Impact Assessment

Build a comprehensive understanding of the full impact of the change on all impacted employee groups

2. Communicating Vision & Maintaining Urgency
Create Urgency + Create A Vision for Change + Communicate to Create Buy-In

Ensure the project’s messaging is robust and inspires the appropriate level of urgency and buy-in from required stakeholder groups. 

3. Stakeholder Alignment
Build a Guiding Coalition

Identify, communicate, and work with the appropriate leaders and stakeholders to ensure the success of the project.

4. Empower Action & Celebrate Short Term Wins
Empower Action + Celebrate Short Term Wins

Understand the barriers to behavior change, identify and track measurable improvement goals, work towards early wins (low hanging fruit) and communicate successes

5. Embed the Change In The Organization and Culture
Don’t Let Up + Institutionalize Change

Determine the gap between current culture, org-structure, behaviors, and future needs.  Create, align, and execute actions plans designed to influence the organization and close these gaps.

6. Project Milestones & Communications

Ensuring concrete plans are in place to deliver the change and communicate effectively to all stakeholder groups

*Indicates one of John Kotter’s 8 Accelerators of Change is mapped to this workstream.

Change Management Tools and Resources a variety of tools and resources have been developed to help UCOP staff successfully manage significant change initiatives. The following tools are either available to all UCOP staff through an HR managed box folder or in the form of a published Smartsheet. Each public Smartsheet is available to copy and use for future projects, for this access please contact ucop-workforce-planning@ucop.edu.

When beginning a project that requires significant change management, follow these specific steps and resources to help start and guide your change management project.

  1. Obtain a High-Level Understanding of Your Project – before beginning your project, use the Initial Project Overview Assessment to ask project members and stakeholders questions about the project, capture key insights and timelines, and as review any existing documents on the project.
  2. Plan engagement with your key stakeholders – use the Stakeholder Analysis Template to identify stakeholders who are critical to your project and identify effective tactics and strategies for engaging them.
  3. Identify key change impacts on a timeline – use the Change Impact Assessment to identify and understand what changes will occur and how these changes will effect the way people do their jobs.
  4. Collaborate with project members to develop your change management plan and deliverables - once you’ve completed the above steps and have a sense of when all the different change impacts will effect the organization, you can use the tools below and your own experience to develop activities that will support the change.

Please use the below tools and resources for any needs through your project. Please remember that change does not happen overnight, work towards early wins and communicate the teams’ successes.

General Change Management Tools

  • Initial Project Overview Assessment – This short template provides an effective way to capture key project insights and timelines and can be used during initial conversations with project team members and other stakeholders to build an understanding of the project.
  • Project Strategy Document – This template captures critical information about the project’s strategy and high-level implementation. It is designed to be shared with senior stakeholders for alignment and feedback before communications and other engagement begins.
  • Stakeholder Analysis Template – This document provides instructions for building engagement strategies with a variety of key project stakeholders. It should be used near the start of a project and updated regularly to ensure alignment and effective change management with critical stakeholders.
  • Comprehensive Change Management Documentation – a comprehensive template of a document with examples entries that can be used to provide project context and other critical change management information. It incorporates a variety of the resources listed on this page. Use this tool when in-depth comprehensive reviews and alignment of change plans are required by senior leaders and other stakeholders.

Planning Tools

  • Master Project & Change Management Plan – This smartsheet template can be copied and shared with project members. It provides a framework for recording key project milestones, change impacts, trainings, communications, and other critical tasks related to the project. It is integrated with several additional resources below enabling teams to avoid duplicative data entry and efficiently update multiple tools at one time.
  • Significant Business Activity Report – This smartsheet template integrates with the above master project & change management plan and enables practitioners to view a Gantt chart of change impacts, communications, trainings, and activities external to the project which need to be considered when planning to avoid over burdening audience groups.
  • Change Impact Assessment – This smartsheet template integrates with the master project & change management plan and should be used to plan details of coming change impacts including intensity of these change impacts, current and future states, impacted audience groups, number of people impacted and start/end dates of these change impacts. Change impacts are defined as any changes to way staff perform their work or interact with their work environment.

Communication Focused Tools

  • Core Communication Planning Tool – This tool helps you document the core messages critical for the project as well as communication goals and should be completed at the start of a project and serve as a guide for drafting future project communications.
  • Communication Governance Model – This tool should be used to define the collaboration and approval process for a variety of communications the project team plans to employ – governance and approvals are typically differentiated by audience type and amount.
  • Upcoming Communications Tracker – this smartsheet integrates with the master project & change management plan and is a tool teams can use to quickly see, track progress, and revise plans for upcoming communications related to their project.
  • Communication Guidance – This document provides guidance on how to write effective communications and how to provide information on LINK articles.

Sample Deliverables

  • Sample Change Management Deliverables – This box folder contains a variety of communications and presentations utilized for past change management projects. You can use these documents to get ideas for your communications and presentations.

For questions on change management please contact ucop-workforce-planning@ucop.edu