WHAT DOES A CHANGE MANAGEMENT CONSULTANT DO?
The Change Management Consultant designs and executes comprehensive change management strategies, encompassing stakeholder management, communication plans, training programs, and adoption metrics to ensure project success. This role involves collaborating with project teams to integrate change management tasks into overall project plans, conducting readiness assessments, and addressing resistance to facilitate smooth transitions. The consultant also develops and implements training and communications strategies to enhance stakeholder engagement and secure lasting organizational change.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Change Management Consultant
1. Change Management Consultant Duties
- Assessment Skill: Conduct an assessment to determine how to manage the change.
- Strategy Development Skill: Develop an organization change management strategy and roadmap to improve adoption of transition initiative.
- Training and Mentoring Skill: Provide training, improve communications, and mentor change teams to increase the adoption of transition and IT initiatives (policies, procedures, and structural changes).
- Communications Design Skill: Draft email announcements, design promotional materials, prepare/conduct briefings, and help develop training material.
- Communication Execution Skill: Manage development and execution of communication artifacts such as presentations, web content, and instructional guides.
- Stakeholder Analysis Skill: Identify key stakeholder groups and conduct stakeholder analysis to prepare an engagement plan and strategy to obtain awareness, understanding, buy-in, and support.
- Stakeholder Communication Skill: Ensure all stakeholders are communicated upfront clearly and in advance for all parties impacted through the changes very clearly with advance notices through emails.
- Engagement Follow-Up Skill: Follow up meetings, leadership broadcast messages, and conduct personal 1X1 meetings for those impacted that will need additional clarification.
- Benefits Mapping Skill: Implement a benefits realization map for transitioning organization for leadership visibility.
- Sustainability Planning Skill: Build a change sustenance plan.
- Project Management Skill: Oversee and lead change management projects, including the researching, implementation, and assessment from start to finish.
- Project Ownership Skill: Own all project goals and ensure that they are met on time and on budget.
2. Change Management Consultant Details
- Change Management Planning: Manage a comprehensive change management plan, which could include elements of stakeholder management, business readiness, communications, learning, and/or adoption.
- Stakeholder Management Strategy: Manage stakeholder management plans adapted to the project and organization.
- Change Integration: Work with project teams to integrate change management activities into overall project plans.
- Change Plan Execution: Deliver against the comprehensive change management plan, which could include readiness assessments and adoption measurement, reporting, stakeholder management, communications, and training.
- Resistance Management: Identify resistance and performance gaps, and work to develop and implement corrective actions.
- Sustainment Strategy: Identify, create, and advise on change sustainment activities and elements that can reinforce lasting change adoption.
- Communications Strategy: Assess and develop communications and learning requirements/approaches when a project requires changes in behavior/processes to support successful delivery.
- Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate closely with internal and external stakeholders.
- Change Adoption: Drive adoption and proficiency of changes for all end users and stakeholders within the organization.
- Client Issue Resolution: Ability to acknowledge and address any client issues and resolve these with the intent of exceeding client expectation.
- Training Development: Conduct end-user analyses and perform change impact assessments and stakeholder analysis to develop training plans and curriculums.
3. Change Management Consultant Responsibilities
- Project Leadership: Leads cross-functional teams in project planning & delivery utilizing various methods, tools, and techniques (projects may include major systems or organizational transformation efforts).
- Change Strategy: Acts as a change agent to develop change strategies collaboratively with the leadership of an organizational unit over a given time period.
- Integration Management: Runs integration efforts on sophisticated groundbreaking change efforts, coaching program & management on plan alignment between technical & business workstreams.
- Transformation Leadership: Leads change strategy development for transformational culture change projects or programs.
- Coaching Proficiency: Builds proficiency in the leaders and project teams (e.g., coach project/program managers, initiative leaders, and other practitioners on change management).
- Innovation & Influence: Influences and helps innovate standards and practices and takes an active role broadly in the field of change management.
- Portfolio Management: Takes a broad portfolio view of change within an organization and across multiple departments.
- Risk Management: Surfaces significant change risks and influences initiative leadership to address them.
- Success Metrics: Defines and measures success metrics and supervises change progress.
- Change Assessment: Assembles change magnitude and measures for change projects and reports results to change lead.
- Project Prioritization: Assists Change Lead in prioritization of projects to determine impacts, change management activities, and resource needs.
- Community Contribution: Contributes regularly to Community of Practice for Change Management Practitioners.
4. Change Management Consultant Job Summary
- Mapping Skills: Create a stakeholder map and engagement plan
- Communication Skills: Create a communications strategy & plan
- Change Management: Assess change impacts & create mitigation plan
- Stakeholder Engagement: Execute, monitor, and adjust stakeholder engagement plan (ongoing activity till project closure)
- Communication Execution: Execute communications activities, monitor results and adjust plan (ongoing activity till project closure)
- Change Agent Mobilization: Create and mobilize change agents network (ongoing activity till project closure)
- Training Development: Assess training needs and create training curriculum
- Training Strategy: Create training materials, training strategy and engage change agents
- Training Delivery: Deliver End-User-training and Train-the-trainer
- Change Sustenance: Create a change sustenance plan and master change plan
- Change Theory Application: Understand the underlying theories of change and is able to apply them in practice
- Behavior Change Design: Design and execute plans to change behavior using a methodology (structured approach)
- Business Alignment: Align change to key business objectives and values
- Stakeholder Assessment: Assess stakeholder willingness, readiness and ability to sustainably adopt the change
- Sustainable Design: Design simple, sustainable approaches
- Project Management: Manage projects and initiatives
- Data-Driven Management: Use data-supported approaches and be tech-savvy
5. Change Management Consultant Accountabilities
- Change Management Skills: Reports directly to the Director of Change Management.
- Consultative and Facilitation Skills: Possesses a balanced mix of change management consultative skills, facilitation skills, high performance team development skills.
- Process and Project Management Skills: Process management and redesign capabilities, project management skills as well as contracting and relationship management skills.
- Collaborative Partnering Skills: Partners with clients in a highly complex academic medicine environment with support from the Director of Change Management as appropriate.
- Agility and Group Facilitation Skills: Demonstrates agility in order to effectively build on the ideas of others and to facilitate group discussions that navigate difficult conversations in service of achieving transformative quality outcomes.
- Learning and Problem-Solving Skills: Values learning and integrating new ideas to solve problems.
- Consultative and Design Skills: Consults with leaders to understand the issues and challenges involved in driving change. Designs interventions to develop and sustain new behaviors and processes coupled with developing appropriate metrics to measure the impact of change interventions in driving successful change.
- Strategic Improvement Skills: Partners with the Director of Change Management to identify and prioritize process improvement opportunities across the Health System. Provides consultation and coaching to continue to elevate system-wide process improvement capabilities.
- OCM Strategy Skills: Identified OCM resources will facilitate the creation and execution of an OCM Strategy and deliverables to address the new acquisition’s integration activities focusing on the impacted staff and stakeholders.
- Organizational Change Management Skills: Facilitate the development and maintenance of the Organizational Change Management Strategy, Workplan, and Communications Plan. Direct project team activities in accordance with the Organizational Change Management Strategy.