All too often, however, it is viewed as a bolt-on or afterthought when in fact it is key in taking you from your first thoughts and ambitions through to the realisation of the benefits you are aiming to achieve. It involves a clear, well-articulated vision, a compelling business case, committed leadership, well-informed and involved stakeholders and an organisation ready and willing to make the change.
Drawing on our experience and applying our distinctive approach to change management, we’ll work with your people to plan and implement change in order to realise genuine business benefits.
An effective approach to change
We think it’s important to have a structured approach to help you manage change, recognising that it’s a complex journey for both your organisation and your people that requires action across a number of fronts.
Three Key principles
Focus on delivering the benefits: perhaps most importantly, our way of helping you change is focused on realising the benefits of your investment. We work with you to drive real clarity on what you are actually going to get by delivering your vision, and exactly how you are going to achieve those outcomes. That way, we ensure the change effort focuses on the right areas, is proportionate to the benefits and is supported by a strong sense of shared ownership and desire for action.
Change the individuals and the organisation: change happens when both the individuals involved and the organisation as a whole are ready. We ensure the right actions are taken to prepare your people and ensure that the processes, systems and culture line up to support the changes you need.
Create commitment not just capability: we recognise that it’s not enough to have people who are aware of the reasons for change and equipped for the new world, there also needs to be a genuine commitment to working in new ways, whatever the challenges. We help you take the right actions to enable your people to really embrace the changes that are needed.
These three principles underpin our distinctive approach to change management and enable us to plan and implement change in a way that realises genuine business benefits.
By applying this framework and the principles that underpin it to your unique situation, we help you take all the critical actions at just the right time to successfully deliver the change and realise the benefits.
A small team; a big difference
We won’t come with an army of consultants or pre-set ideas or methodologies. Instead, using our deep experience and guided by our framework for effective change, we’ll work with you to construct the right approach, making sure your people are at the heart of the change that you want to achieve. We make this a key part of what we focus on with all our clients. With change management, as with so many of our areas of work, it’s the people who make all the difference. It requires a lot of effort and sensitivity, but it pays dividends.
Our experience
We helped an international airline implement a full suite of new customer facing systems across 80 locations and 12,000 staff.
The airline was preparing to replace all of its customer facing systems. With nine months left to go-live, there was sudden a recognition that although the planned systems changes would impact 75%+ of core business capabilities, only limited work had been done to date to prepare the business. Berkeley helped the organisation to respond rapidly, identifying and then driving delivery of the critical change activities needed to get the business ready both in terms of capability and people’s willingness to move to new ways of working. Crucially, we also led a reassessment of the business case, enabling senior management to understand and lead on realising the benefits of implementing the new systems platforms. As a result of these interventions, the programme was able to go live on time across 12,000 staff and 80 locations without major operational disruption. As part of this work we also helped the airline establish their own internal change capability including training their staff and creating a change management framework which responded to the unique needs of international aviation.
We helped a global consumer goods company successfully deliver next generation collaboration and productivity tools and ways of working to 100,000 people.
This global FMCG organisation promoted collaborative, efficient and flexible ways of working through the use of the latest cloud storage, instant messaging, on-line meetings and video presence technologies. A change management team had been established but was struggling to support the pace of delivery. Senior stakeholders were unclear how employees could prepare for and adopt the change and, as a result, were losing confidence in the overall programme. The organisation asked Berkeley to carry out a fast-paced diagnostic review and then invited us to take on leadership of the change work. Berkeley quickly developed an overall change approach and plan and re-aligned the existing team around this. The reinvigorated change team became a credible part of the overall programme team, working effectively across all work streams. The new clarity around approach and roadmap, along with the successful go live to thousands of people restored stakeholder confidence and built a strong set of relationships for the future.
We turned around delivery of change management for a pharmaceutical company‘s ERP programme impacting 80,000+ employees across 108 countries.
The Global HR Team were responsible for the roll out of a new ERP system and processes to support Employee Development Plans, High Potential Identification, Talent and Succession Management. Five months from Go Live, the team had not sized the change impact, had no change management plan and had not begun design or build of the training material. Berkeley were asked to take over and turn around delivery of change management on the programme. Our work enabled the programme board to quickly make informed choices on priorities and trade-offs and we then successfully drove delivery of the critical change activities through the local senior management and HR functions, enabling a successful roll out concurrently across 108 countries and 80,000+ employees.
We helped a newly formed financial regulator establish a wide-ranging culture change programme.
Berkeley worked with the emerging leadership team to define the values and behaviours that would characterise the new organisation alongside the range of interventions needed to create this new culture. These included an ambitious communications and engagement programme touching all of the organisation’s employees coupled with significant investment in training. The approach also included ensuring all of the fundamental supporting enablers were considered, including changes to the organisation design and processes, a new performance management and reward framework and a re-focusing of the talent management strategy.
We created an in-house change capability to support radical supply chain transformation at a global FMCG present in 180 countries with annual turnover of c€50bn.
Faced with increasingly intense competition in developing markets, the client needed to transform supply chain efficiency by enabling its thirdparty distributors to use mobile devices to provide real time access to back office and stock control systems. Strong change management was needed to help distributor and client staff adopt the solution and change ways of working. Berkeley worked with the client team to design and develop a bespoke change management toolkit for the programme, including a set of easy to use tools and templates. The change management toolkit was rolled out across 13 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, supported by the client’s own in-house team who by this point had the skills and experience needed to lead the ongoing work themselves. The new solution subsequently went live successfully in several further territories, delivering both efficiency savings and competitive advantage as distributors become able to respond quickly to changing market needs.