We recently introduced the new Change Management Kit — available in the Customer Journey Toolkit on the Citrix Success Center. The kit focuses on the people side of change — the proactive and methodical approach to facilitating people’s movement from a current state to a future state — so you can minimize disruption to your organization while maximizing business results.

The Change Management Kit provides guidance on what human-centered change management is and why it’s important. The kit also includes leading practices, samples, and templates you can leverage in your own change initiatives. By including change management in your project plan, your end users will be more willing to adopt the change, ultimately increasing your speed to value and helping you achieve greater ROI.

We’re excited to share that we just added three new sections and two new templates to the Change Management Kit — to continue empowering you to build your change management muscle.

Read on for an overview of these new additions.

Aligning Leaders to Be Effective Sponsors

Sponsors and change champions at all levels of the organization are critically important to the success of your change. Your role is to identify your sponsor — or coalition of sponsors and champions — early, ensure they’re aligned on the mission and strategy for the change, and help them understand what’s expected of them throughout the project.

The Aligning leaders to be effective sponsors section outlines:

  • Why effective sponsorship is vital to your plan
  • What effective sponsorship looks like
  • Your role in coaching sponsors
  • The importance of a champion group

This new section also includes a sample sponsorship roadmap, designed to help guide the creation of your own roadmap and prepare your sponsors to actively engage in your change activities.

Change Management Kit — Sample sponsorship roadmap (Click image to view larger.)

Identifying Change Impacts

You’ll find the Identifying change impacts section after the Engaging stakeholders in change section. Once you understand who your stakeholders are, it’s time to start identifying how they’ll be impacted by the change.

This section provides guidance for:

  • Identifying how your employees will be impacted by the change
  • Tips for planning for potential resistance
  • Key questions to ask

This new section also includes a sample change impact analysis that you can download and customize for your own rollout.

Change Management Kit — Sample change impact analysis (Click image to view larger.)

Building Knowledge and Skills

The final new addition to the Change Management Kit is Building knowledge and skills. Once you understand who your stakeholders are and how they’ll be affected, you’ll be able to identify the new knowledge and skills they’ll need to ready them for the new way to work.

This section highlights best practices to consider when creating your training plan, as well as content to help you get started.

What’s Next?

We hope you feel more empowered to apply change management principles to your next rollout with the expanded Change Management Kit. Be sure to visit the Success Center regularly for new and updated resources — designed for every stage of your journey and built to help streamline and accelerate your project.

If you have any questions about change management, feedback on the Change Management Kit, or if you’d like to speak to our experience team and share your own story, please email us at CSM@citrix.com or leave a comment below.

— Lauren Tobon, Senior Employee Engagement Strategist, Customer Success Management