Creating independence by building a client’s change management muscle

Just because something is daunting doesn’t mean it isn’t doable. 

A multibillion-dollar leader in nitrogen-based product manufacturing had plants and distribution centers in the United States, Canada, and the UK.  Experiencing mixed success with the rollout of new initiatives, system go-lives, and organization changes, the global agribusiness recognized a need for professional change management.  Three thousand employees adopting Change Management seemed daunting to Senior Leadership, but they were committed to improving the ease and uniformity of operations.  The client partnered with Clerestory to ensure the strategic initiative’s success and build internal Change Management capabilities for the future.    

The client chose Clerestory because of the variety of ways that the firm participates in change management initiatives.  We can teach EMBED℠our proven Change Management methodology in a classroom setting.  We also welcome client members as working participants on our Change Management teams. Don’t have the right resources available?  Clerestory will be responsible for all Change Management activities.

To achieve our client’s ambitious goals, we needed to customize change management roles, tools, processes, and language to make it uniquely their own.  Achievable, sustainable, and organized change was the goal.  Training for leaders and their teams would prepare them to adopt standard change management techniques and tools.  Building our partner’s internal change management skills would increase their long-term resilience to marketplace fluctuations.

We always apply our proven approach to help our clients manage change in an organized and non disruptive way.  Every Clerestory project is a custom project.  We listened to senior management to understand and document their vision for an in-house Change Management function.  Taking stock of available resources and clearly defining the launch process helped to frame the effort.  Once proposed staffing was known we documented the implementation strategy for tier-one Change Agents.  Then we built and tested the tools that would support successful execution in specific client-specific situations. 

Clerestory’s experience provided the critical thinking and communication skills to make the hand-off and adoption of customized change management operations possible.  Strong communication and comprehensive change management principles enabled our client to establish change management processes globally.  With our assistance, our client had a scalable, custom toolkit for large and small initiatives.  To unify the company culture, we produced promotional and educational videos for trainers and stakeholders to leverage.  Leaders fulfilling the roles of Change Agents learned the new methodology, and facilitators prepared for the future.  Clerestory’s job wasn’t complete until we created independence and built our client’s change management muscle.  

The greatest benefit our partner experienced was the company-wide confidence boost that came from collaboratively developing and taking ownership of a new way of working.  This victory was culture building.  It established and promoted a uniform vision and approach to communication and change management.  Nothing increases stakeholder engagement as quickly as the shared experience of aligning people and processes to deliver a successful program. 

Nothing makes Clerestory happier than making that happen.