Developing a change management plan

As the world changes and the needs of our beneficiaries and funders change too, voluntary organisations need to adapt what we do. You may need to:

• restructure your team
• change the way you work
• provide new services or change existing ones.

But continual or large-scale changes can be unsettling, create stress and undermine organisational effectiveness. So carefully planning and managing change is key. It ensures staff and volunteers can adapt effectively while still delivering much needed services.

This page guides you through the planning phase.

Successful change starts with acknowledging and understanding the need for change. It’s tempting to see that something needs fixing and quickly jump to a solution.

But try to resist the temptation and instead spend time understanding why your organisation needs to change. For example, has something changed in the external environment that you need to adapt to?

In most change situations, you’ll need to involve stakeholders in your planning. Too often, one or two individuals will have a great idea for change and create a plan without involving others. It's not until the implementation stage that they realise others don't support their plans.

But if you consult stakeholders and listen to their ideas, your changes are more likely to be successful. For example, if you involve your team in understanding the need for change, your changes are more likely to address the complexity of the problem. If you involve people in your planning, they’re also more likely to help champion the change when you communicate it to the wider organisation.

To understand who to involve, consider who’s affected by the problem you’re trying to address – and who might hold influencing power. Some people hold influencing power because they’ve been given authority to lead or manage others. Others might have particular expertise or knowledge that can inform your plans. You could use an influence map to map out where the power lies in your organisation.

If you involve stakeholders in your planning, it's important to give involvement the time it needs. If you don’t give your stakeholders adequate time to engage, they won’t buy into the changes – or alert you to things you need to re-think.

Occasionally, you may not be able to involve stakeholders. For example, if your organisation is facing a significant crisis and may not survive without immediate change, you need to move very quickly. This might mean you don’t have time to develop a shared solution with all your stakeholders. However, maintaining good communication will be essential.

Having understood why change needs to happen, your next step is to identify what you want to achieve through change – and how you’ll get there. You’ll also need to consider the possible unintended consequences of change. The following questions can help.

• What are your goals? For example, do you want to deliver a better service? Our guidance on setting SMART objectives might help here.
• What changes will you need to make to achieve those goals? For example, do you need to structure your team or organise work differently? Our guidance on ‘Theory of Change’ frameworks can help you break down long-term change goals into a series of smaller steps.
• Why is your proposal better than what you have now? Will it allow you to meet your goals? Are there other benefits? For example, will you save money?
• Could your changes to specific roles, processes or services inadvertently affect the ability of the whole organisation to achieve its goals? For example, changing the working hours of your administrative staff might not seem a huge change, but it could have broader implications for the organisation as a whole.
• Will the changes you’re proposing mean you’re inadvertently discriminating against a protected group? You may want to consider doing an equality impact assessment.
• If your proposed changes aren’t going to improve the existing situation, or have unintended consequences, could you take a different approach? You might save time by changing processes, but if staff feel demotivated as a result and look for new roles, you’ll end up worse off.
• If you decide to implement changes, consider how you’ll measure success. What will staff, volunteers and beneficiaries be doing, saying, thinking and feeling differently if the changes are successful?

Once you’ve set your goals, understand how you’ll achieve them, and know how you’ll measure success, you can plan how you’ll implement any changes. Consider all the activities that need to happen for you to achieve change. Which tasks need to happen first, and which can wait until later?

You could use this three-step framework to help identify your activities:

• Step 1: Design it – get the foundations in place.
• Step 2: Enable it – engage people and create the momentum for change.
• Step 3: Set it – implement and embed the change.

A Gantt chart or a critical path analysis can help you schedule your activities. A Gantt chart is good for timetabling more straightforward projects. A critical path analysis might be better for more complex projects involving multiple activities.

The Association for Project Management provides more guidance on how and when to use Gantt charts and critical path analyses.

Plan in time to review any changes you have made against your agreed success criteria. The timing of this will depend on the scale of the change.

To review the changes, you may want to re-engage key stakeholders. Have the changes had the desired impact? Are there areas for improvement?