Issoria’s clients can be categorised, very roughly, into two groups. Firstly, there are those organisations who have an existing Change Management Office (CMO) and want help to improve it, and/or to strengthen their global delivery capability with a flexible extension of their team. Secondly, there are those organisations who currently do not have a CMO – and who often are not clear about the purpose of an in-house CMO.
This article will help those of you in the first group expand your ambitions, and those in the second to clarify the role of CMO and help you start to map out your approach to building one.
To give the broad context it is worth noting that the CMO is not a new concept. Increasing numbers of organisations have CMOs. I see them vary in size from a few people in a single location, to the large global CMOs with headcounts in three figures. Some of the global CMOs I work with are highly mature organisations and are regarded as critical functions by the organisation’s leadership.
Nevertheless, there are few universal standards as to the role of the CMO. Every organisation’s CMO has a slightly different remit and focuses on different aspects of change management from the others. But, overall, I believe there are four main roles for CMOs.
The four main roles of a CMO
In this article, I am going to highlight what these roles are and I will look at aspects of these roles in more details in future articles. For now, I want to give an overview. The four core roles as I define it are:
- To act as the centre of excellence in change management
- To provide a “home” for Change Managers
- To optimise the cost of change management
- To provide a mechanism to manage enterprise level change
1. The centre of excellence
Central to the role of all CMOs should be its activity as a Centre of Excellence, or CoE, for change management. A change management CoE owns the approach to change management in the organisation, and has an over-arching responsibility to ensure the quality of the change management undertaken.
Supporting this, the CoE should define and maintain the change management methods and tools. As CMOs mature these methods and tools become richer – enabling support for initiatives of varying types from traditional large-scale programmes, to incremental and continuous change such as pursued via Agile, as well as support for non-project based activities such as cultural and behavioural change.
An important activity for a CoE, is to ensure change initiatives understand those change management standards and that they develop plans which include sufficient time and resources to execute them. By educating change managers, and the wider organisation, the CoE builds out the change skills so it develops as a core competence of the organisation. Finally, the CoE has an audit and quality control role, making sure that appropriate approaches to change management are adhered to in all the key change activities.
2. The home for change managers
It is probably the most basic, but important, role of the CMO to act as a centre for the recruitment and day-to-day management of change managers in the organisation. The role of the change manager is not always well catered for in other organisational units or functions. They have a unique skill set, and their job profiles do not always fit well into other teams. By providing a “home” for change managers, the CMO can ensure that the quality of recruits is kept high and that there is an appropriate career framework for change managers. They can also manage the allocation of change managers to the most appropriate change initiatives depending on their background and experience.
“By providing a “home” for change managers, the CMO can ensure that the quality of recruits is kept high and that there is an appropriate career framework for change managers”
Additionally, given the variation in change management workload in most organisations, the CMO usually has a need for some degree of flexible resourcing. By managing this through the CMO, the CMO can ensure the quality of partner organisations providing change managers.
Finally, not all staff involved in change will work directly in the CMO, but there is still value in having a focal point for the change aspects of their roles. For instance, many organisations have built change networks. The change network typically consists of people with an interest in change management who help the implementation of change at a local level. Whilst they often have a different full-time operational role, the change management elements of their roles are best developed and enhanced by interacting with a skilled CMO.
3. Optimise the cost of change management
In organisations without a Change Management Office, there is usually no idea of the total cost of change management in the organisation. By funnelling all change management resources – both permanent and contingent – through the CMO, the organisation gets a much better understanding of the cost of change management. Without an understanding of the cost, it cannot be managed or optimised.
“In organisations without a Change Management Office, there is usually no idea of the total cost of change management in the organisation”
Costs can be controlled by reducing the excessive use of change management contractors and consultants, which tends to happen when there is no single team responsible for the recruitment and staffing of change management roles on initiatives. That does not mean the elimination of contingent change managers, but it does mean only using contractors and consultants when it is appropriate because the workload is variable and not worth recruiting permanently into, or a specialist skill set is required.
One lever in this, is the CMO’s role in choosing the best partner organisations to provide change management skills, and hiring resources either against a negotiated and standard rate card or through service charges against agreed statements of work.
4. Enterprise level change
There is a final role for the CMO, which I typically only see in the most advanced CMOs. Most CMOs act as a “home” for change managers, and also act as the CoE for change management. The more advanced CMOs add a layer of significantly increased value, by providing a way of assessing and managing change at an enterprise level.
One question is how does this differ from the role of a portfolio management office? The portfolio management office typically looks at the portfolio with the viewpoint of project management. It will ask questions like: what resources are available to deliver, and what is the best way to deliver those initiatives in the portfolio. This is important, but it misses a critical aspect of successful change and transformation.
Whilst delivery is largely constrained by the availability of resources, and the dependencies between initiatives – successfully implementing all those initiatives and achieving the desired benefits is more complex than a standard portfolio level plan makes visible. It also depends on the organisation’s ability to adopt change. To assess this, requires taking on the mindset of the change manager.
By assessing the portfolio of change at an enterprise level, and included in this are not only those large programmes which are run centrally, but also factoring in the level of distributed change across the organisation, the CMO can help optimise the portfolio level planning.
By looking across all the change happening, the CMO will look for areas where too much change is planned for some functions in the business risking change fatigue or excessive operational disruption. The CMO can also spot opportunities where teams could absorb more change than is currently planned. By doing this, the organisation is much more likely to achieve the outcomes it wants.