Cost Benefit of Change Management

I recently  had the pleasure to meet Lizette Tucker from US based firm Arrowhead Strategic Consultants in Paris. Lizette is looking to expand her business in France, as she seems to like our country very much. I did warn her that the initial enthusiasm may fade away as she slowly discovers the downsides of our country: in other words she may go through a steep change curve!

Our conversation turned around a recurrent theme for change managers: the challenge of conducting a good change management cost benefit analysis. For example, how can we quantify the benefits of turning initially resistant people into an engaged force? The task is not too difficult if a change management program is the one and unique answer to a business problem: if for example a program is carried out to change the behaviours of plant personnel to improve safety, then you would just take the usual safety performance indicators as a measure of success. 

It becomes however more difficult if change management is only one part of a global program for example in a merger or an ERP implementation. How can you then precisely quantify the contribution of change management to the overall results of the program? Lizette has been working on a cost benefit analysis tool, currently under test, that should be able to help us answering this question. 

Until then, here are a few key benefits I usually like to stress out:

• Avoid bad surprises: anticipate, understand resistance to change, and therefore prevent it from causing damage at the wrong time and jeopardising the project.
• Help building momentum: by installing a sense of urgency to change and giving people responsibilities, opportunities to take ownership of the change. The result is that they will start taking their own initiatives that will install the change, initiatives that the change leaders wouldn't have thought about themselves 
• Develop a know-how: engaging, empowering, explaining, listening, adapting; all of which are actions that, done over and over again change after change, will enable the organisation to change faster, naturally.