How to size your Change Management Office
One of the common challenges for Change Management Office (CMO) leaders is appropriately sizing the CMO. It can be very hard to answer, with any degree of confidence, how many people should be in the CMO.
Assessing the number of change managers an initiative requires can be hard enough, but to add to this complexity there is the ever-changing nature of the change portfolio to deal with, as well as resourcing for the wider aspects of the CMO’s role.
Change initiatives can be hard to plan accurately, and timescales have a habit of altering. Sometimes setting a fixed date by which a change initiative should complete, can be against the interest of successful change. Ensuring change outcomes are achieved often needs a flexible approach to change management as the organisation responds to change in unique and unpredictable ways. It can therefore be difficult to plan exactly when change managers will complete one piece of work and be free for the next.
However, a CMO is a function in an organisation, and like every other function, that has to plan and budget its resources. In this article I lay out some thoughts on doing this.
What’s the role of your CMO?
As with any other situation in which a department or function has to be sized, the starting point must be to understand the role of the CMO. Although CMOs have some commonalities, the precise roles and responsibilities vary between organisations. For example, a CMO may be a pure resourcing function for change managers onto large transformational initiatives only, alternatively it may be a function which anyone contemplating change must mandatorily engage with, and finally it might have functions outside the provision of change managers – such as providing change management training or providing enterprise wide change planning.
Without a clear remit and role, it is impossible to size the team with any degree of certainty. Of course, over time the role may change. Many CMOs start out as a small group of change managers and then grow into a larger role. This means that on a periodic basis the CMO leader is going to have to reset expectations about the size of the CMO. Having a supportive sponsor, and a clear plan for CMO development, are key success factors in achieving this.
Change Managers (CM)
Whatever the role of the CMO, at its heart are the change managers who work on change initiatives. This statement brings to life the central elements of sizing a CMO:
- What change initiatives are running in the organisation?
- For each initiative, how many change managers are required for how long?
But as anyone who has done any change planning knows, these apparently simple questions hide a huge amount of complexity.
The change portfolio keeps flexing, and timescales of initiatives can move around. This means anyone sizing a CMO must accept two realities. Firstly, the sizing is unlikely to be exactly right. Secondly, there will almost always be a need for some level of flexible resourcing, unless the CMO is prepared to be a resource bottleneck from time-to-time.
Still, for budgeting and headcount reasons, the team has to be sized.
Where to start when sizing your CMO
The starting point for sizing a team must be to assess the portfolio. As a rough rule of thumb, I’d suggest looking at the portfolio and breaking it down into:
- Initiatives for which no CM support is needed
- Simple initiatives, which result in small local changes that can be managed by the project team themselves.
- Initiatives requiring a part time CM support
- Here the change manager acts in an advisory or coaching role and is typically working on several initiatives in parallel. I think its hard for a change manager to work on more than 2 or 3 initiatives at once, even if they are small. If you are not sure, make an assumption. I start with the assumption of one change manager to three initiatives.
- More complex initiatives requiring a full time change manager
- Assume one change manager per initiative.
- The largest transformational initiatives requiring a team of change managers
- In this case sizing is bespoke. Change team sizes for such initiatives are typically in the range of three to five full time employees, although it can of course vary significantly. I have seen initiatives with 20 change managers, but such a size is rare. Fortunately, in most organisations there are at most a handful of such initiatives, and these are the ones to focus on when sizing.
To help in doing this, Issoria have developed a tool to help size the resources you require for each change initiative, complete the Change Calculator and it will estimate the type and amount of resources recommended for your initiative.
What other resources should you consider
I have focused on the core resources of the CMO, the professional change managers who support change initiatives day-in and day-out. For a small CMO this may be all the resources you have or can justify. But for the largest CMOs, and I am aware of CMOs in global organisations with dozens of staff, there will be need for certain other resources.
For instance, you may want to consider having members in your team for the following activities
1. QA of change managers’ work
In a small CMO this is normally done by the CMO leader, or by peer reviews between change managers. But in the largest CMOs it can be worth having an experienced change manager dedicated to assuring the work of change managers.
2. Pipeline management and resource planning
As with any pool of resources that are allocated out to projects, there is an ongoing need to monitor the pipeline of work and plan resource allocations. Again, for a small CMO this may be done by the CMO leader. But as the scale increases, this soon becomes a large enough task to justify someone to be dedicated to.
3. Reporting and global change portfolio management
The most sophisticated CMOs are regularly analysing the entire change portfolio, ensuring strategic alignment and achievement of outcomes across the portfolio and reporting on change at a global level. This soon becomes a task that justifies headcount allocation, although this is only appropriate in the largest and most mature of CMOs, who have the demand for such reporting from executives.
Give yourself a bit of flex
One answer to the sizing conundrum, is to avoid the problem by not hiring permanent staff. The CMO can instead rely on interim change managers who are hired as and when needed, only for as long as they are required. This is a tempting solution, but I have tended to find that the best CMOs have a core of permanent staff. Even so there are good reasons for using a proportion of interims. There are a three main reasons for going into the contract and consultant market for change managers:
1. Demand fluctuations
The first is the simple and obvious reason that the demand for change managers fluctuates. Whilst you probably want some level of in-house permanent team members in your CMO, it’s hard to justify permanent 100% headcount for a variable workload. The common solution is to have some level of flexible resourcing, perhaps by hiring individual contractors and consultants as required. A better solution is to find a partner who will work with you in the long term, who understands your culture and change management processes, and even works with you in planning demand cycles and provides resources who are selected specifically for your needs and with an understanding of your culture and approaches to change management.
2. Budgeting
Whilst I always argue for CMOs having adequate budget to develop and grow their team, it does not always happen. CMOs are then left to depend on project and change initiative budgets to recruit change managers with. Given the essentially short-term nature of project budgets, this almost always means that change managers are external interim hires, brought on board for the duration of the change initiative and then released back into the market at the end.
3. Access to insights
The third reason for hiring some of your change managers externally, and that is to give yourself access to new thinking and new approaches to change management. Change management is a dynamic discipline and there are always new approaches, tools and techniques to be aware of. By having a proportion of interim change managers, a CMO can gain access to a wider pool of thinking than they might otherwise do.
In summary
Sizing the CMO can be challenging, but it is essential for budgeting and headcount allocation. The process to size a CMO must start with clarity on the role of the CMO, as this varies and will impact how many people the team requires. Once this is known the core resources will be change managers, and they need to be assessed relative to the pipeline of work coming from the change portfolio. On top of this, larger and more mature CMOs tend to have other dedicated roles for activities like QA of change, portfolio analysis and resource planning. But resources do not have to be permanent staff, and a degree of flexible resourcing from the interim market is always helpful given the unpredictable nature of change management demand in most organisations.