Managing Change Using a Maturity Model
The pace of change is accelerating. Government agencies, and their employees, must find new ways to support their stakeholders and manage internal operations in the face of changing mission expectations and potential budget cuts. Guiding the workforce through the change is messy and challenging and is essential to successful implementation of innovative ideas, technologies, and processes.
Before implementing a large-scale effort or transformation, an organization must understand its current state capabilities, and, more importantly, clearly articulate the end-target for change and any intermediate milestones. Clearly understanding the differences between current desired capabilities enables an organization to set goals that are realistic and helps employees to better understand how expectations related to their work are changing.
A maturity model is a great tool for assessing how your organization or team is functioning and describing the pathway to evolve to ultimately deliver desired results and outcomes. Agencies can assess their maturity level as they take on change initiatives in today’s dynamic, rapidly changing, and budget constrained world.
Often used as benchmarks to assess an organization’s capability maturity, maturity models are very effective tools to explain the direction, nature, and magnitude of an organizational change. By providing clear descriptions of services or activities in increasing levels of maturity across a range of key factors, maturity models help people to understand and internalize “as-is” and “to-be” states.
The model helps teams focus on goals that are realistic, tangible, and achievable, no matter their current capabilities. It also provides a visual set of specific objectives to work towards rather than just stressing the need to “do better.” It is not unusual to have different offices within the same organization at different phases on the model if their business or mission requirements differ. Using a model helps to clarify and explain such distinctions so employees can understand changes and expectations.
Change can be stressful. Openly communicating with employees about next steps and listening to their feedback helps to set realistic goals while also producing buy-in for change where the effects are felt the most.
By making a maturity model an integral part of your change management plan, your organization can reap the benefits of an evolving environment and give your employees the tools to thrive in times of change.
About Arc Aspicio
Arc Aspicio is a management, strategy, and technology consulting firm that takes a mission-oriented approach to complex client challenges. As a rapidly growing company, Arc Aspicio has a bold strategy for 2016-2018 that drives growth through new capabilities in strategy, design, human capital, data analytics, information sharing, cybersecurity, and strategic communications. The company is known for a strong, collaborative culture that values gratitude – for its clients and its great team. And, #welovedogs! Follow us on Twitter @arcaspicio or learn more at www.arcaspicio.com.
