Creating and evaluating a change management roadmap for successful expectation management

Abstract

Companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors in the current globalized business environment. A few of these corporate change efforts have been very successful, and a few have been utter failures. Most fall somewhere in between, with a distinct tilt toward the lower end of the scale. The lessons change efforts are engaging and will be relevant to even more organizations in the increasingly competitive business environment of the coming decade.

The purpose of this study is to identify the most critical key aspects of change management in the Finance community and to create a standardized change management roadmap that delivers the right message about the change for stakeholders to manage their expectations about the deliverables from the change project before, during and after the project. KONE Oyj, an elevator engineering company focused on providing a smooth people flow through innovative solutions for new and existing buildings, is the target company of this development study.

The theoretical framework was derived from the change management theories (organizational change management, transformational leadership, strategic change communications, and relationship buildings) and through a four-phased research design. The framework planning stage and data collection and analysis for the pre-project survey took place from February to April 2022. The implementation and data collection for the post-project survey and evaluation took place between May and July 2022. The conclusions and recommendations based on the data analysis were formed in August 2022.

As this development study focuses on finding practical solutions to a functional problem, action research was chosen and qualitative for the research method. The Change Management Roadmap created by this study gives a systematic approach to change communication with tools and templates focusing on change stories, training, and controlling the change. The deliverables from this study were piloted in a Finance Development project, and findings were further evaluated for subsequent deployment.

The outcomes of this development study encompass tools for managing the most crucial change management aspects, along with a list of other methods for future development efforts. The results of this development study, a new change management roadmap, and tools fit well for the needs of the company’s Finance Development PMO team, which was recently set up in the company.

Keywords: change management, change management roadmap, change story, project management, communications, change KPI trackers, expectations management, co-creation