Test

Credibility is of paramount importance for both the underlying project and the change management activity. In some situations, credibility has been so damaged by past failures it may well be the overriding risk to the project. This is why everything done to institute change has to work properly. This Step in our lifecycle is dedicated to Moves that ensure everything you plan to do will be the right thing done right, at least as far as change management is concerned

Credibility does not necessarily demand flawless perfection, which means all possible issues that might arise have been experienced and worked out. That is the preserve of well-established processes and long experience across many variables (people skill, tools, method, etc.). Change, by its nature is neither of those. You only need to consider a currently vogue looping approach (Yes, I’m talking about you, Agile…) of deploy, discover (errors), fix, and redeploy that is so dominant in the technology business to see that credibility can co-exist with error. While mistakes can (and will) happen, they are acceptable without loss of credibility under two conditions.
1. They are infrequent and errors of choice (”We could do this… we chose that…”) that do not alter the underlying purpose or value of the change.
2. The error can be attributed to several, often subjective causes (maybe timing, maybe execution, maybe…) so the remedy is to an aspect of the change not to the fullness of the change.

Change testing

This step assumes that the purpose of and choices for the change are solid and the broader change project is taking the appropriateness of the narrow changes into account. So the focus here are Moves that test the change management activities and, more specifically, the descriptions and instructions for how affected people are to alter their behaviour. The goal is to eliminate and avoid confidence-killing fails specifically relative to change adoption.

As always, there are very likely other things happening at the same time related to earlier (or later) Plays. But for training, coaching, communication particularly, these Moves describe how to get change management testing done.