What Exactly Is Change Management and Why Is It Important?

Change is a part of life, especially in business today. Change management helps us understand the forces that drive change and manage them to achieve desired outcomes.

At DemandLab, Change Management Consultant Charlie Padilla delivers services to clients to support their business growth. He solves strategic challenges by utilizing change management, enablement, and training frameworks to ensure the success of complex projects and implementations.

We talked to Charlie about change management with our client projects at DemandLab and its overall impact on business success.

How would you define change management?

It’s pretty straightforward: It’s about managing change.

Within an organization or a process, there may be a need to make a substantial change. That is where having a change management consultant can be incredibly beneficial: To have an unbiased outside party there to help quarterback that change.

And every department has an impact or an influence on the process, procedure, or structural change that’s taking place. They all need to have their voices heard. They deserve a say in how they’re affected by those changes, and they know their processes and department better than anyone else.

Effectively, what a change management consultant does is work with anybody who is affected or who is going to be influenced by that change to understand their concerns, what processes need to be created, and what training content needs to be established. It always begins with an audit to know exactly where we are now—and where we want to go.

After that, we establish how we get there and the key stakeholders we need to identify in creating these processes or developing new training. We need to determine who will assist us or at least provide direction so that once all this new content and strategies are created, they are all documented and organized into a logical format. It all needs to be added to a database easily accessible by anyone needing to take part in those processes or changes daily.

How does change management benefit clients?

I’ll provide an example; recently, a client consolidated multiple Marketo instances. Each had different terms, processes, procedures, and marketing flows used in their environments.

Many adaptations were needed: They were migrating their nurture programs, such as batch e-mail programs, and all marketing automation flowed into that new process. However, some changes occurred because it’s not just a copy and paste from one database to another. About five people had been tasked with essentially wrangling and managing all the processes that needed to be created and documented and what kind of training needed to be established. So about five different documents and processes needed to be turned into one.

So to help make sense of these different processes and deliverables, we took a step back and did an audit of everything we had—because we needed to make sense of everything. Then we put everything into a master spreadsheet and reorganized it so it all made sense from a training standpoint of how to get from Point A to Point B to Point C and so on. We worked on establishing a flow that would make the most sense and then identifying who on the client teams are the best people to go to to create those processes and help build the training content.

What is different about the way we handle change management at DemandLab?

Our approach focuses on ensuring everyone involved is consistently involved, and that communication remains open. That brings everybody together. It provides comfort and confidence. Change is scary, but it’s less scary when you know the communication lines are always open.

Let’s be honest: Change happens frequently. Suppose you’re cut out of the conversation or looped out of communications. In that case, you might not be able to communicate that a change has recently occurred that renders all or some of the training content completely invalid—and that’s a poor experience.

In your opinion, what is the most important aspect of change management?

Organization. Constant organization and structure. That’s followed closely by communication. If you’re translating multiple components into one master document that everyone works out of, for example, you need visibility and structure that is easy to follow for all involved.

What do you wish clients or even the general public knew about change management?

Any aspect of any change can benefit from the expertise of a change management consultant.

For example, if you’re updating a sales process, that’s change management. First, you need to understand what the current sales flow looks like and what you want the optimal version to look like. Then you have communicate that new process all along the way, create the training content, and teach it to all those who will use it.

Change management is how you successfully bring people from point A to Point Z in the least painful way possible.

People need to understand it is incredibly important to be particular about how things change; we’ve all had experiences of when things change, and you’re not informed about it. But with good communication, we can explain why it’s changing and how it will be better.
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What interests you about change management?

I find it rewarding: like coming into a cluttered room and making sense of it, and then executing a plan to bring that mess into order smoothly for all parties involved. This is fun for me: I have a weird and keen ability to wrap my head around complex situations from the point of view of someone who needs that content to be helpful.

Are you interested in learning more about change management? Contact us to discover how DemandLab can help.