In week four of our interactive trial of Matae Change Workspace, I was invited to choose my own adventure. What I discovered along the way was a mutual respect for having the right data driving the right decisions. To this end, Matae has steered away from over-automation, choosing instead to make options and views available from which a change manager can draw conclusions about where to next.
Matae Change Workspace pursues data-driven change management
While I might want more automation of the data and views important to me, not all change managers are built alike, and no two change management assignments are exactly the same. Matae's Change Workspace therefore pursues data-driven change management within very particular constraints.
Matae has been working on the feedback gained throughout the trial period, and aiming to make improvements to the tool while still allowing it to be flexible enough to make sense of any organisation's bespoke process.
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 4: Business Readiness Assessment Tool and Choose Your Own Adventure
The Business Readiness Assessment Tool
From the central menu, click on "Toolkit" to find the Business Readiness Assessment. You can name your assessment, select the changes associated with it and nominate an Owner. This part of the Matae toolkit will enable you to identify the things that need to be in place prior to go live across the business. These might not necessarily be tasks that you're overseeing, but they are prerequisites to going live with the Changes you're managing.
You can create multiple assessments for a single project. You might do this to match a reporting cadence, or because there is more than one deployment to track. You can assess any number of Changes associated with a project, by selecting them on the first screen.
Terminology was again an issue for me to start with, as the tool defines readiness as the measures that need to be achieved prior to deploying changes. This is different to my definition which is that readiness would be more or less an expression of how well the deployments are going, by impacted group. The Business Readiness Assessment tool seems more complex than the others, so it might be worth remembering that at this stage you're constructing a project-based view. I caught myself wondering whether it had been mis-named, or whether it should be broken up into Project Readiness and People Readiness in order to make full use of the functionality on offer.
The tool brings in dependencies you already created, and shows you the current status of each. From a system point of view, a dependency is also a Change, so you can update its status in the Changes screen from the Details menu. Once you've done this, you would create a New Report and add your comment which will be recorded at today's date. Next you can select Change activities and see a summary of status of Work Streams and Deliverables from the Change Activities Plan; and Milestones from the Change Deployment Plan. Again, you would create a New Report and add your comment.
It's important to note that this tool gives you many options, but doesn't prescribe or hard-code any of them. This continues to be true for metrics. Use New Measure to list a metric you'll be tracking. You can use tools from Matae Change Workspace such as Sentiment Analysis or you can choose metrics externally. Each time you add a report, you can update the status of the measure and make a comment.
The Business Readiness Assessment Tool seems to be more of a tool where the Change Manager plans the reporting structure they want to maintain, and tracks performance in preparation for delivering reporting outwards. This is important because you would then make adjustments to the execution of your change plans in response to the Business Readiness Assessment you captured using the tool.
Send a Survey
Surveys are a great option, and operate well. Whether you're a fan of surveys (I'm usually not) I think having the choice integrated into your change management tool might make all the difference. I liked having survey templates available to start off with, and that they were usefully broken up into Alignment, Go-Live, Deployment and Sustainability, with each easily editable within the tool. It appears to be seamless to attach a covering email, set a closing date and push send. You can even create an entirely customised survey with three different question types: single choice, 5-point rating and free text.
I like surveys for feedback on change activities, but not so much for gathering metrics related to adoption. However you choose to use it, I think you'll find Change Workspace seems to handle surveys exceptionally well.
Complete a Leadership Sentiment Assessment
Another great piece of functionality that is easy to use and saves time in building manual views. I like having this inbuilt into the tool, but I always add a word of caution around commentary that may be seen to judge an individual's attitude or impact an individual's privacy and right to confidentiality. The sentiment score calculated as a result of the sentiment analysis helps to understand the relative priority for engaging each stakeholder. You can then choose from a drop down list to view Likely Advocates or Likely Resistors. I thought it was great but had a couple of points of feedback, which Matae are considering.
Firstly, I strongly recommended a password or some other protection to keep this section private if needed. Change Workspace is potentially visible across the entire Project Team, and if someone sees and shares this information out of context, stakeholder relations may suffer. Secondly, I wondered if we could see this go on to drive something in the Change Workspace toolkit, such as showing the engagement plan next to each stakeholder. This way, we'd see the sentiment score, our plans to engage the stakeholder, and be able to judge whether we're doing enough.
Get to a Single View of Change
This was a little more challenging. First I wandered around, and then asked for specific help. Bear with me while I provide both narratives, because this week is all about choosing your own adventure.
Looking for the Single View of Change
Starting with My Projects, I can see both projects still in Align phase. The only filter I have is "Program Level Plan" which was the Tag I added to my new project. I wondered whether I need to add progress to these projects to show the single view of change so moved on to the Change Deployment Plan and was able to mark a Milestone as complete, but not able to edit the Changes. As I'm able to edit Deliverables and Work Streams, I marked those as complete.
I then looked into Activation. I can't update progress here, this menu option is predominantly about Impacted Groups. I can't seem to update high-level progress in the Engagement or in the Details tab.
After updating progress in the only place I could find (Workstream), I went out again to My Projects to see if I'd discovered the single view of change. I had not. Despite all the Workstreams being completed, the Sample Project had not moved to Deploy stage. Then I noticed I could pick it up and move it across manually with the mouse! From here, going back to view an individual change, I noticed I can update the status manually on the Change card.
I learned a lot, but unfortunately I couldn't find the single view of change through my own personal exploration. But never fear, Matae provided a much better answer.
Matae's Explanation of how to get to the Single View of Change
Matae's explanation was straightforward. To achieve a single view of change:
create all your projects
define the changes associated with those projects
create the impacted groups within each project
link the relevant changes and deployment dates of those changes to each impacted group (remember, if you're not using people data, you can use personas to tag these groups instead)
In the Reporting menu, you can then view portfolio reports such as the Change Go-Live Timeline which provides a 12-month timeline of future planned deployments impacting your people. In other words a single view of change for the next 12 months. You can also view the Change Go-Live Heatmap which shows the amount and intensity of change between different audience groups. Finally the Change Load report provides a view of the current volume of projects and changes impacting employees and leaders of a defined audience group.
Week 4 Goals: Achieved
At the end of the week 4 trial, I felt I had a pretty good handle on most functions of the Change Workspace Tool. Matae has reported they're busy enhancing the tool, based on feedback from the trial, and we'll bring you an update on how those changes came through.
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 is an interactive review, so feel free to drop us a comment. To participate and try out the features for yourself, sign up for your own trial here:
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