Change management platforms need to offer more than just a collaborative space to share information. How our potential tools handle change activities has got to be among the paramount criteria for assessing their value add to our change management processes. But more than that, modern tools need to bring in the best of the platforms that went before them. As we look at how Matae Change Workspace handles Change Activities, we need to also understand what it considers a change activity to be.
If you're anything like me, you have a spiel that rolls off the tongue. Something like:
Change Management works with the levers of Communication, Training, Engagement and Organisational Design to optimise adoption thereby protecting the organisation's financial investment in a program of change.
And these activities might sound pretty standard, but definitions of what constitutes which kind of activity can vary; and ultimately impact your expectations of what a tool can be used for.
This week we're delving into the Change Activities Plan, Training Planner and Engagement Planner in Matae Change Workspace.
Participate in our interactive review of Matae's Change Management Tool
This will be an interactive review in which everyone in the Agencia Change community can participate. As an Agencia client, member or subscriber, you will be able to follow along in your own free trial version of the tool.
Sign up to trial Matae Change Workspace
Nothing beats experience, so follow along with this review by signing up for the early access trial from this link: https://www.changeworkspace.io/try-for-free-agencia-change
This is a full a trial version of the web-based Change Workspace platform. Matae has provided this so the Agencia Change community can enjoy the review and follow along by checking out the same features we'll be discussing in the blog - directly in the Change Workspace Tool.
The trial version is limited only in duration, so you can experiment to your heart's content. At the commencement of your trial period, you will be sent an email with your log in credentials. No payment or credit card details will be required to participate and there will be no obligation to continue using Change Workspace following the conclusion of the interactive trial. The team will provide you with their data policy (all on-shore in Australia) and privacy policy upon request. There's an inbuilt support button in the tool you can use for this purpose.
Don't worry if you're coming to this review late, if the link is still operable, you can review the tool for a 4-week trial period. So please follow along as we review this brand new change management tool: Matae Change Workspace.
Week 3: Planning and Tracking Change Activities
Change Activities Planner
Locate the Change Activities Planner under Plans in the central Change Workspace menu. The Change Activities Plan is the plan you'll see beneath the Change Deployment Plan. Changes are expressions of the future state and the Change Deployment Plan lays them out in timeline format, allowing you to add milestones to the view. The Change Activities Plan looks similar to the Change Deployment Plan but operates differently.
If the Changes are the question, then the Change Activities, Training and Engagement Plans are the answer.
The Change Activities Plan provides a timeline with information collated about Work Stream, Deliverables and Activities. Contrary to some of my feedback from last week, Activities is one place where the information you enter here, as well as information entered against Change Impacts, will also be brought through, and also represented in your Engagement Plan. This was a plus for me, and a functionality that could potentially be duplicated to great benefit in other areas of Change Workspace.
The Change Activities Plan differs to the Change Deployment Plan in that it's interactive. Whereas the Change Deployment Plan only offers edit-ability of Milestones (in this view), the Change Activities can be fully edited here. To add a new activity, work stream or deliverable, choose your option and go for it. Then, you're able to edit these by clicking on the items in the view. This is nice and easy.
My definition of Deliverable and Activity happens to be the reverse of the Matae definitions, but I can't fault the tool for this - it occurs quite regularly among people who’ve worked in different project environments. Rather than getting caught up in multiple individual definitions, Matae is considering opportunities for customisable labels so users can define the terms that work for them. Suffice it to say you have an item that operates like a fixed-date milestone, you have a main task that runs for a period of time, and you have sub-tasks that you can associate with the main task.
Once you've entered your Plan items, you'll be able to visualise them in gantt-esque format. But I was looking for a bit more from this view.
Firstly, it would be great to zoom out and capture the entire timeline of activities, but the view of time is static and cannot currently be collapsed or expanded. Secondly, the symbol for activities looks a bit like a warning or system alert, so given that I started out a little confused by the terminology, this threw me momentarily (again, this is an opportunity for customisation). Thirdly, it took me a while to grasp what the definition of Work Stream would be because I couldn't link a Project Team or Sponsor to a Work Stream, only Impacted Groups and Stakeholder Groups. I also couldn't relate a Work Stream to a Change. And I think I may have been questioning how was a Work Stream different to a Change as defined in the Change Workspace structure.
The team at Matae has advised the best way to think about Work Stream is a collection of your change deliverables (things you’ll be working on) within a similar theme. Say, for example, Governance. You would add Deliverables under your Governance Work Stream like Align Operating Model, Create RACI, Consult with Steering Committee and so on. And the Work Stream is automatically related to the Project you’re working in at the time. As mentioned, Change Activities can be added in this view, and they will also be imported from the Change Impact Assessment if you noted any Activities to help you manage Impacts. Activities appear similar to a milestone in that they are shown as occurring on a single date. But Work Stream is independent of any specific Change. This might be a good thing for some in-house change teams, as it may present an opportunity to add a layer of organisation to a portfolio of change.
Training Planner
The Training Planner appears to be the functional twin of the Change Activities Plan, so there is a major task, a sub task and a milestone-style function available. These are called Core Stream, Sub Stream and Training Event. It seems to me that these offer good coverage of most training activities I’d want to plan and manage.
I was thrown again by the request to enter dates without being able to see the timeline information I'd already entered, and there is a technical error that Matae will fix with the input screen wanting both "Audience" and “Groups” attached to training streams. This will be tidied up and only “Audience” will be required.
Engagement Planner
Find the Engagement Planner under its own menu "Engagement" in the central Change Workspace menu. For me the Engagement Planner was definitionally more of a Communications Plan, but there is a view you can choose, the Group View, that was a little more what I might expect to see in an engagement plan.
Email planning and meeting planning are very nice in this tool, but the overall feeling in the Engagement Planner leaves me with the impression there's more to do here for Matae. One aspect to work on might be to determine who is using this view. If it's the Change Manager, input of planning data might be made more streamlined. If it's the Portfolio Change Manager, the ability to zoom in and out of the timeline and find clusters of activity a little easier might be helpful.
Matae has taken this feedback on board and is working on a copy and paste functionality for planning out multiple meetings and emails in advance. They are also working on zooming out the timeline to see several months worth of planning at one time. I anticipate these to be very handy improvements.
The filter function is quite nice, allowing you to isolate and view the Engagement Type (email, meeting, Yammer Post or survey) against all or some of the Stakeholder Groups and Impacted Groups. I can see myself using this for an overview of what's been scheduled in large, complex programs.
Week 3 Goals: Achieved
At the end of the week 3 trial, navigate to the Reporting Menu at the top of the screen, and select from various views to see how your projects are coming through in a portfolio view. Have a closer look at Reporting, using filters to isolate audience or individual groups as necessary.
Stay tuned as we continue our series reviewing the Matae Change Workspace tool, and look out for articles from our guest blogger Matt Dragun, Matae Founder. https://www.agenciachange.com/news
Remember, this will be an interactive review, so feel free to drop us a comment, and to participate and try out the features for yourself, sign up for your own trial here:
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