Change management tools play a crucial role in navigating organisational transitions effectively. They facilitate streamlined communication, collaboration, accountability, data-driven decision-making, and risk mitigation. Many change managers will be working with their own DIY change management tools, having pieced together various elements to service the breadth of need they have across end to end change management.
Some of our readers will be aware of the Matae organisation and its toolkit based on the Microsoft Teams platform. Matae is carving out part of their tooling especially for Change Managers as it launches the web-based application Change Workspace.
The web-based Change Workspace will be available as a free-standing tool for change managers designed to replace your spreadsheets and make change planning easier. When combined with organisational data, Change Workspace claims to offer a complete workflow that enables management of your change deliverables, training, activities, change risks and tactics with an inbuilt project management tool designed for managing the people side of change.
I was excited to be invited to trial and review the Matae Change Workspace tool. And, although we're good mates, I'll be bringing you an objective review of Change Workspace over the coming few weeks in this blog. Better yet, we're making it interactive so you can experience the features you'll be reading about hands-on.
Matt Dragun, Zac Raykos and the team at Matae will be working with me each week on my experience during the trial to offer their guidance and commentary prior to me bringing it to you. And look out for a special guest blogger over the next few weeks as well.
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.
Download the interactive trial version of Change Workspace
Nothing beats experience, so follow along with this review by downloading an early access trial version from this link: https://www.changeworkspace.io/try-for-free-agencia-change
This is a full a trial version of the web-based product Change Workspace. 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.
This is a free download of the full version 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.
So please follow along as we review this brand new change management tool: Matae Change Workspace.
Week 1: Login, Set Up and Create a Project
Logging in and Setting Up
Change Workspace is on the Microsoft platform. This will be familiar to many, and many people will already have Microsoft accounts through their workplace email and office subscriptions. For those who don't you'll have the option to subscribe with an existing personal account or email. Please note that logging in to the early access trial version may be a slightly different user experience.
The interface feels very familiar, being closely aligned to Teams, and most people will feel comfortable to use and explore the product.
During set up, a couple of features I really liked was being able to add personas and flesh those out with specific employee names later: this felt like part of my natural process. Secondly, there's a sample project loaded so I could get a view of how my data was going to look, and I could mimic some of the structure in use by the sample project.
However I did hit an initial hiccup because for structural reasons I was asked to enter the number of phases of my organisation's change management process. In the tool the number of phases is limited to 1, 2, 3 or 4. This doesn't align to the Agencia Change methodology - although I acknowledge I should consider rolling up into phases, I haven't yet. Therefore, I'm not able to represent our Accelerate methodology in the Matae Change Workspace tool before I do that extra work to define phases.
Matae advised that the number of swimlanes has been capped at 4 due to design and readability constraints for using the app on a 13 inch laptop.
In some personal exploration I found the Change Workspace Base Toolkit, and I loved three things. Firstly, the simplicity of being able to assign an owner to a simple Change Narrative which resembled what I might call an Elevator Pitch. Secondly the Change Implementation Risk Assessment feature which is very guided allowing less experienced change managers to build a view of risk with confidence. Finally Impacts has a great filter, very useful for targeted stakeholder conversations, detailed change impacts analysis or meeting preparation.
Creating a Project
Moving on to our Week 1 objective, Create a Project. I think its fair to say this works much better with real data and a genuine project to consider rather than as a hypothetical. I did question Project Tags with the Matae team, as I was asked for them early on in the creation of the project without knowing what they are or how they might help. The team advised that Project Tags are used as reporting filters for portfolio level reporting, the use case being multiple projects in large transformations or programs. A tag can be created to provide a sub-view of a work stream or program within a portfolio.
Capturing the Changes
During set up I had initially thought I'd run a hypothetical project through the trial, but reversed that decision when I saw how much more I would get from my experience using a real, complex program. So initially I had made an error of how many employees were involved. When I created my project, I could only select up to 150 employees as this must have been what I originally entered. I liked that I was easily able to go back to the Admin screen and increase the employee headcount to >5000 and then return to editing the first change.
This might seem a trivial point, but I think it's worth mentioning given that Matae is suggesting Change Workspace will replace the spreadsheet you're currently using. You still want flexibility to upscale.
Where it came to date labels for the start date and finish date of changes, we had some differences in terminology to work through. Matae has some improvements coming that should resolve this labelling issue. So more on this later.
Add Stakeholder Groups
What's fascinating when you deal with experienced change people is how you soon seem to align on the important points that matter. In the Matae Change Workspace tool, they have taken the approach that Stakeholder Groups have a different structure to Impacted Groups, and you'll see this immediately in the definition "Those groups who are not directly impacted by the changes but need to be informed of progress." This is to be applauded, but may be unfamiliar to change managers who are unaccustomed to the treatment of stakeholders who are not actually impacted by change outcomes.
As mentioned above, the tool allows you to work with personas until you have enough data or momentum to add real employee names. There are some inbuilt personas that function as you would expect, including Sponsor - for the overall change - and Owner - for specific change components. In a similar way there's a hard-coded "group" called Project Team. This is quite neat, as again, if you're moving off a spreadsheet, you may still need the flexibility to include those ambiguous stakeholders who are seconded on to the project team but who are still significantly impacted by the change.
Week 1 Goals: Achieved
At the end of the week 1 trial, you should be able to achieve a Change Deployment Timeline and the Implementation Risk Assessment Framework.
I have a feeling you're going to love the Risk Assessment Framework as I did. In the case of the two changes I'd listed it was a very interesting mental exercise to determine which was going to be more difficult. One change affected more people but the solution was far better defined; and the other change affected fewer people but was less aligned in both problem definition and solution scope. The resulting graphic has created a view which I know will be very useful for sharing with stakeholders, and very easy to update and edit.
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 to participate and try out the features for yourself, download your trial version here:
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