Best Practices: People and Culture - Critical Success Factors for Managing Change
The following list highlights some of the key ingredients for ensuring that any process changes are readily accepted and sustainable:
Executive management 'buy-in' is critical to every project, but is especially important when there is a high level of organizational and process change. Clear continuance of management commitment to the new CoP system is important to the overall program success.
Upper management must provide clear direction to all stakeholders of where the organization is going in order to facilitate the redesign and implementation of new processes. This should be for both the short and long-term vision of the project.
Effective management and communication of business process change is essential to successfully change buying behaviors. It is recommended that USAID's staff with knowledge of the current environment lead this effort as they have first hand knowledge of the current state.
A comprehensive communication program should be designed to support a continued effort to demonstrate the benefits of CoP system to managers and staff.
An ongoing training program should be designed to train new users and to keep existing users current with the system.
Ongoing evaluations of user needs to confirm that the CoP system is responsive to the changing needs of users.
Establish performance measures by which the program success can be measured early in the implementation (e.g., user acceptance, skills assessments) as it is difficult to retrospectively measure success.
In the long run, development of performance standards and organization incentives to encourage continued use of the system will contribute to wide acceptance of the new CoP system.
