Change happens most effectively when individuals feel they are being listened to and understood. Surbjit Laroya-Annan and Laurene Batkin explain how KPMG’s Change Cloud makes this possible, even when transformation is vast, complex and impersonal. 

Digitisation and business transformation is happening everywhere – whether it’s focused on transforming the front office, core functions or the whole enterprise. With many initiatives underway simultaneously, individual employees can be subject to continuous and often overlapping waves of change. It can feel overwhelming, with people losing all sense of purpose.

This is exactly the opposite of how individuals need to feel to make transformation successful. To be fully engaged in change, people need to feel their perspective is understood and to be clear on the benefits that change will bring.

For organisations trying to support the workforce through myriad changes, this can present a real challenge. Tracking the impact of concurrent, shifting and complex initiatives on diverse groups of stakeholders is difficult, particularly when change is led centrally but felt locally in the front line. To achieve sustainable outcomes organisations need to have a clear answer to the following questions:

• how much change can the organisation absorb?
• how to prioritise transformation initiatives to maximise success and minimise risk?
• how can different groups of stakeholders be supported effectively?

We’ve developed Change Cloud to put people at the heart of transformation. It is a one-stop tool that gives a single view of all change data across the organisation and makes clear how change initiatives will impact different stakeholder groups (or ‘personas’) at different points. This enables organisations to plan personalised change journeys that include highly targeted communications and learning interventions.

Our Change Cloud sits at the heart of our people-led transformation methodology. It’s a powerful tool that delivers data insights to optimise every stage of transformation delivery:

• The People - It all starts with people, Change Cloud allows to map and understand each stakeholder group – their intrinsic motivation, potential resistance, gain and pain points etc – and to create a persona for each group.
• The Transformation story - Change Cloud captures data from multiple teams, functions, regions and countries all in one place to tell a holistic transformation story and support effective prioritisation. Also enabling continuous change evolutions to be captured and reviewed.
• The Journey - Based on the persona data, tailored change journeys are created, customised for each persona taking into account their needs and degree of change impact. Personalised change journeys allow organisations to communicate clearly, helping people make sense of change and be clear on what is being asked. Change journeys designed in Change Cloud draw from a best practice repository of change and adoption tools, including learning resources, communications templates and nudge campaigns grounded in behavioural science.
• The Business Readiness & Success - Change Cloud allows to monitor business readiness and identify ‘hot spots’ across the organisations.
  The change journey does not stop at go-live. Change Cloud uses dynamic visualisations and dashboards to track and measure adoption, giving insight to enable sustainable change.

Ongoing transformation is inevitable as businesses invest to stay relevant in a constantly changing world. Data insights from Change Cloud enable organisations to tailor the change journey for myriad groups of stakeholders – winning hearts and minds, de-risking delivery and helping embed change. Because, in our experience, the most successful transformation happens when change feels personal.

Are you going through wide scale and/or continuous transformation and want to maximise change and adoption, take a look at our people-led transformation blog, and please do get in touch if you would like more information.

Change Cloud is a one-stop tool that enables all users to understand, engage with and manage change data to deliver a successful transformation programme.