Conduct a change management kick-off meeting

Whether you’re retiring a legacy system, adding a new application for your work, or simply modifying an existing bureaucratic process, a successful plan for change management starts by putting yourself in your user’s shoes. By creating a change management plan with this kick-off meeting, you can reduce disruptions and ensure a smooth roll-out; communicating your change has never been easier!

We recommend bringing in the core project team responsible for implementing the change. If your problem involves a very technical change management plan, make sure that everyone involved has a chance to review it prior to the kick-off meeting.

First, introduce the main goals for this meeting:

• Agree on key points to use in change management communications
• Identify any communication channels
• Sequence all activities needed to implement the change
• Clarify each team member’s roles and responsibilities

Next, ask the leader of this change to outline its goal (update an old system, streamline an approval process, etc.) and explain what prompted the change, who approved it, and why. Allow some time for Q&A around this explanation.

Lastly, the team should brainstorm together what would happen if the change was not implemented – these outcomes can be both positive and negative. Record your team’s thoughts so they can be referred to.

Collectively, brainstorm guiding principles. These principles can be based on previous team experiences or even individual beliefs. For example, some guiding principles could be:

• Communicate early and often with the user
• In disagreements, we will turn to the consensus of the majority
• Always have someone review the change’s success over a certain time period

Once your team has decided on a set of 3 – 5 guiding principles for this change management project, take note of them to make sure they are easily referenced as the change is happening.

Change management is used as a technique because it allows those hesitant to the change to become more comfortable with a new way of working. One of the most important ways to be more comfortable is through effective communication. Anyone affected by the change will want to know why. As a group, discuss the following questions and record your answers:

• What is changing?
• When will the change come into effect?
• Who, within the project team, is affected? How?
• How will this change affect the end user and their team (separate from the project team)?

Your team may come up with more questions and answers than above, be sure to record those as well.

As a group, brainstorm all of the applicable channels your team can use to communicate the change with users. This can include:

• Department-wide e-mails
• Posts on the TC Home Page
• Small-scale focus groups
• Kiosks in the building lobby

For each communication channel your team comes up with, rate it on the following scales:

1. Number of users it will reach (few, some, many)
2. Level of effort required to deliver (low, medium, high) 

This task will allow your team to identify the best communication channels to reach the most amount – or most appropriate amount – of users. You can justify certain methods of communication based on how they will be received, especially when reaching out to a certain group is more critical than another.

This section determines when you will deliver the key messages to users and by what method. Many changes have imposed deadlines – your team can either work backward from that deadline or take an agile approach by estimating the team’s level of effort to deliver each step of the change. By using this method, you can determine milestone dates to reach before the final deadline. 

Start by recording any relevant dates that are already set – even those unrelated to the project, such as departmental events, holidays, or other team commitments.  

Next, pick the high-level message you wish to communicate, communication method (ideally, the one that reaches the most users with the least effort), who will deliver the message, and when. Ideally, these key communications should be delivered twice: once to announce that a change is coming, and a second time to state that the change is underway or has taken place. 

Once the dates of the broadest, most key communications have been determined, your team should also decide who needs to be communicated with or trained before this message. There may be a certain group that you anticipate being more difficult to reach and “break through to” with this change – it’s been found that anticipating who these people are, and bringing them in for focus groups or feedback sessions will mitigate objections and can facilitate more constructive suggestions. 

Finally, review this sequence of activities. Make sure there is an opportunity for the user to deliver feedback, and time to implement that feedback into the process. Establish these dates as milestones worth celebrating. 

The final step in the change management kick-off meeting will ensure successful execution of the change.

Review the sequence of activities once more. This time, assign some key positions to individuals on your team:

• Driver: responsible for collecting input or feedback and staying on schedule
• Contributor(s): subject matter expert(s)
• Approver: provides the final say on completion and quality of any activity in the sequence

For changes that will reach a broad audience, we suggest 1 – 2 contributors from the core project team as well as 1 – 2 contributors from outside the team but with subject matter expertise. This will provide a variety of perspectives.

Lastly, assign roles and responsibilities for feedback implementation. Part of the team should be responsible for reviewing and coordinating on feedback that comes in after each sequenced activity; this feedback should be recorded and referred to at all stages of the implementation. This will ensure that everyone knows who is responding to feedback, and that the responses will be consistent.

• Step-by-step instructions for tracking your team’s health, and new ways of working: The Atlassian Team Playbook (Atlassian, 2019)

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