Change Management Strategies for Change Managers. Plus Get a Free Change Strategic Playbook Template
Best Change Management Strategy Playbook with Free Samples, Template, and Checklist
This free guide provides you with everything you need for conducting the best end-to-end organizational change management strategies, activities, and deliverables.
It includes a free change strategic playbook that you can use for planning, implementing, and tracking the success of your business change strategy and change management activities.
Before you can even begin to put together an effective change management plan, you need to document your organizational change management strategy. This involves outlining what you are going to do in each of the change management stages of the project, including the types of strategic change plans you will implement.
When should you develop your strategy and change management strategic playbook?
You will typically do this after you’ve conducted your change management assessments. Assessments are typically done in Phase 1 of a strategic change management process and the development of a strategic playbook is done in Phase 2.
The change impact assessment, organizational readiness analysis, risk assessment, and other change assessments that you perform will provide output that will be used to create the playbook explaining your strategies for implementing change.
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In this article, we’ll provide an overview of organizational change management strategies and what is typically included when creating strategic change examples for your playbook deliverable.
We’ll also look at the answer to, “What is change management strategy” with a detailed overview of the key things to include in your strategic playbook.
Need a free time-saving template for creating your strategies to implement change? We have one for you!
Table of Contents
Keep on scrolling down this page to read each section or click any link below to go directly to that section.
1. What Is a Change Management Strategy?
2. What Is a Change Management Strategy as Compared to a Change Management Plan?
3. What is a Change Management Playbook?
4. What Should You Include in Your Change Management Strategic Playbook?
5. Sample Table of Contents to Outline Your Strategies for Implementing Change
6. Change Management Strategic Framework for Change Practitioners
7. Best Change Management Deliverables
8. Proven Change Management Roadmap for Driving Change
9. Overview of Impacted Organizations & Job Roles
10. What is Change Risk Assessment Score? Why is it Important for You to Know?
11. Overview of Key Change Management Objectives
12. Overview of Your Various Change Management Plans
13. Next Steps for Your Change Management Playbook
14. Change Management Playbook, Strategies & Samples | Everything You Need
15. Getting Started with OCM Solution Toolkits
16. Find More Change Readiness Resources
17. OCM Solution Free Change Management Strategy Playbook FAQs
Do you have any questions about the OCM Solution Strategic Change Management Strategic Playbook? Please reach out and let us know. Continue reading below to learn all about a free change management strategic playbook that has been leveraged by thousands of change management practitioners, project managers, program leads, and HR staff.
This editable template with a detailed change management strategy example also includes the ability to export and present a change management strategy PDF or PPT.
How to Make the Case for Change Management
Easily explain the value of change management to your leadership, key stakeholders, sponsors, and management with this ready to use Change Management Presentation PPT Deck: Making the Case for Change Management.
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What Is a Change Management Strategy?
Basically, a change strategy is a documentation of the strategy that you will use to design, develop, implement, and track your organizational change approach and key deliverables and activities.
The goal of an organizational change strategy is to facilitate a specific transformation or project that is being undertaken to guide the impacted individuals, teams, and groups through the change successfully.
Different types of change management strategies can be developed to address different types of organizational change.
One OCM change strategy example may be a large-scale change that has companywide impacts, like a corporate merger. In this case, the organizational change strategies used would need to be quite robust and include training, coaching, and extensive stakeholder and resistance management.
In other change management strategies examples, you may have a project that has a slight impact on one job role only, such as an update in the invoicing procedure. This would mean a different OCM strategy would be deployed that was much smaller in scope.
Strategies for dealing with change will vary according to the project, impacts on individuals and groups, and several other factors.
However, some change management tactics are shared by all strategies for implementing organizational change. For example, communicating effectively about the change to target audiences and proactively and reactively mitigating stakeholder opposition.
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What Is a Change Management Strategy as Compared to a Change Management Plan?
What’s the difference between an organizational change management strategy and a change management plan?
- Strategy is stating what you will do.
- A change management plan is a documentation of exactly how you will do what you stated you would do
Here are change management strategy examples vs change management plan examples:
- Change Team: “When we roll out the change, we will provide weekly communications to provide awareness and status updates.” (This is a change strategy)
- Change Team: “We will create detailed communications plans, as well as training plans to educate Sales, Finance, Operations, and Manufacturing teams in the US, Canada, India, UK, Europe, Africa, and Asia.” (This is a change strategy).
- Developing and completing any of these plans above that the Change Team has stated (strategized) that it will do is an example of a “change management plan.”
In the typical stages of change management, if you are using the OCM Solution Change Management Framework, the creation of your change management strategic playbook and your change management plan will both come during Phase 2 (Develop Phase).
But you will naturally develop your organizational change management strategies and strategic playbook first. Then you will leverage this when developing your change management plan, which details how you will carry out your stated organizational change strategy.
Is there a best change strategy that you have used that you would like to share with other project managers and change leads? Please, reach out and let us know.
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What is a Change Management Playbook?
A change management strategic playbook summarizes your change management communication, training, stakeholder engagement, resistance management, and other strategies for implementing change.
It provides an overview of the scope and scale of the change impacts, and the change methodologies that will be applied, as well as a review of the impacted groups, processes, geographical regions, and legacy tools that will be changed.
A strategic organizational change management playbook is sometimes referred to as a “business readiness playbook” for getting an organization ready to transition from a current state to a future target state.
Other sections of the strategic change management PDF or PPT playbook present insights on your target audience analysis (job roles and functions that are impacted by the change).
In general, a change management strategic playbook provides an overview of the various organizational transformation strategies that will be used for:
- Communicating with your impacted audience (Communications Planning)
- Working with leaders and managers to ensure communications are cascaded down to the rest of their organizations (Stakeholder Management)
- Establishing and managing a change champions network – very critical for increasing the success of the business change (Change Champion Networks)
- Working with key managers and coaching them to more effectively support change management deliverables (Coaching Plan)
- Tracking and measuring your change management activities (strategic change process for metrics tracking)
- Managing resistance (Resistance Management Plan)
- Training & reskilling change management stages (Training Planning)
- ….and many more
The strategic organizational change management playbook is also often used to familiarize key stakeholders, firm leaders, project resources, and program leads with the organizational change approach and framework being leveraged for the program.
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OCM Solution Free Change Management Strategic Playbook
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What Should You Include in Your Change Management Strategic Playbook?
The findings (output) from your assessments to determine the types of strategic change impacts happening throughout the organization will be the core used to develop your end-to-end organizational change strategies and playbook.
If you look at the stages of change management in the OCM Solution change model, you’ll find that conducting these assessments is one of the first things you do, which is why this activity is included in Phase 1 (Assess Phase).
Once you have these assessments, you’re ready to move onto Phase 2 (Develop Phase) and use them to create your strategies to implement change that you document in your change management strategic playbook.
Depending upon the scope and scale of the program, here are some of the assessments that will be used to develop your change management strategy examples:
- Project Assessment
- Change impact assessment
- Stakeholder analysis
- Organizational readiness assessment
- Program and change risks assessment
- Target audience analysis
- Organizational culture assessment (if culture change is needed)
Every project is unique, and strategic change management examples need to be customized to reflect the scope and scale of the change management deliverables that will be designed, developed, and executed for this project.
If your project includes a change that will severely impact business groups, or if the project is running into a lot of resistance, then to be effective change management strategies should emphasize a more comprehensive change management approach.
For example, for a large-scale project or a project that impacts users that aren’t very receptive to change, you will want to communicate more, use different communication channels, as well as implement a proactive and a reactive resistance management plan to mitigate resistance.
In addition, you will want to increase your engagement activities with end-users and stakeholder leaders to increase awareness, and build an overall desire to support the change.
Whether you are in the UK or Australia and creating an organisational change strategy or in another country, the strategic change process will be similar. It will be dictated by the project requirements and scope of the impacts on the organizational groups and end-users.
In the following sections, we will provide you with the key components to include in your change management strategy PDF or PPT playbook.
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Sample Table of Contents to Outline Your Strategies for Implementing Change
A change strategy document should start with a Table of Contents (TOC) that outlines the various organizational change strategies that the change practitioner will use in driving the people side of change for a transformational change program.
Example of the Free OCM Solution Change Management Strategic Playbook. The TOC updates automatically as you add sections or edit section names!
The example above is from OCM Solution’s free playbook for strategic change management. This is an online cloud tool that is flexible to use for all types of strategic change.
You’ll find that this change playbook provides a robust change management strategy example, your strategic playbook might not need to include quite as many components.
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Get a Free Change Management Strategic Playbook
You can sign up for a free OCM Solution account to get this free playbook tool that allows you to easily create and export a strategic change management PDF or PowerPoint to socialize with sponsors, key stakeholders, program leads, and other critical project stakeholders.
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The OCM Solution Strategic Playbook is full of change management strategies examples to get you started. You can edit the text, add your own images, add or remove slides, and much more!
You’ll also see that this free online tool answers frequently asked questions for you, such as “What is a change management strategy?” and puts that information in context to help you better explain it to others.
Gain valuable insights to help you in creating your organizational transformation strategies.
We include charts, images, and data insights to guide you in how to summarize your assessment findings and types of change management strategies. Using these different mediums to present your strategies for dealing with change allows senior leaders to better digest the information.
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Change Management Strategic Framework for Change Practitioners
One of the components you should include in your OCM strategy playbook is the change approach or change management framework you intend to use to govern your strategic change process.
You may be using a singular approach in your strategies for implementing organizational change (such as the OCM Solution Change Management Framework or the Prosci ADKAR® Model). Or you may be using a combination of different approaches to guide your strategy and change management activities.
If you use our free change strategy example playbook, you’ll already have the information you need if using the OCM Solution Change Approach.
The OCM Solution change framework is a 5-phase change model that uses a “manage by deliverables” approach for implementing change management.
The phases categorize the change management deliverables & tasks needed to conduct a successful change project from start to finish. This methodology allows the freedom to accomplish those deliverables in the way the change team feels is most optimized. Learn more about this OCM strategy here.
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Do you have any questions about the types of change management strategies? Please reach out and let us know.
Best Change Management Deliverables
To accomplish the strategic change management examples laid out in your playbook, you will need deliverables. Change management deliverables are a tangible or intangible good or service that is required to be delivered during the change management stages as part of your plan.
The deliverables included in your strategies to implement change will vary depending upon the types of change management strategies needed to match the scope, scale, and impacts of the project.
Strategic change examples of deliverables would be a stakeholder assessment, a readiness status report, or the deployment of your change management communication plan.
It’s helpful when creating your playbook for your organizational change management strategies to be listed by change management phase, aka your stages of change management activities.
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Proven Change Management Roadmap for Driving Change
A change management roadmap is a graphical overview of the key change management deliverables and milestones that need to be delivered in support of a business change.
The change roadmap helps provide a visualization of your organizational change management strategy in a quick snapshot. It is presented on a timeline with a sequenced flow of the change deliverables.
The roadmap functions as a high-level overview of key change deliverables and activities. It can also include dependencies from a program or project plan. It is an important way for change project managers to “tell the story” of their project and their organizational change strategy.
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Overview of Impacted Organizations & Job Roles
As we mentioned earlier, your change impact assessments and other key assessments, such as stakeholder assessment, organizational readiness assessment, and target audience assessment all help you plan your change management strategy example playbook.
Effective change management strategies need to be molded to the results of the impact assessments which tell you which groups, roles, and individuals are being impacted, how severely they’re being impacted, and how receptive they may or may not be to the change.
Whether you are creating an organisational change strategy (UK spelling) for a large change or developing change management tactics for a smaller transformation, you need to have your change assessment results as a key highlight in your change management strategic playbook.
Be sure to use different types of graphs and visualizations to present the data comprehensively.
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Screenshots from the Free OCM Solution playbook with change management strategy examples.
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What is Change Risk Assessment Score? Why is it Important for You to Know?
Change risk management is the process involved in analyzing, identifying, understanding, managing, and reporting on the risks that a change management program, business initiative, or project will face throughout the lifecycle of the change implementation.
Your change management tactics will be dictated in part by the risk assessment. Using a Risk & Readiness 4×4 chart like the one above is a helpful addition to your playbook when explaining your strategies for dealing with change.
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Learn more about the change risk matrix and how to do a change risk assessment for your strategy and change management tactics.
Overview of Key Change Management Objectives
What is change management strategy? The heart of that answer should be included in your overview of change management objectives. This is where you provide the key areas of change management that you intend to deliver for the project.
This could include things like delivering a training plan, providing timely awareness communications, working with managers to coach them on the organizational change approach, and other key objectives.
Click to sign up for a free account to begin using this timesaving Change Strategic Playbook right away (no credit card needed!).
Because this is an overview, you don’t have to provide a detailed explanation of each objective in your change management strategy PDF or PPT. Instead, you can provide just a few sentences that explain what the objective covers.
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Further down in your strategic playbook, you can offer more details on these change management strategies examples if you like.
Overview of Your Various Change Management Plans
Now that you’ve provided an overview of your change management stages, approach, and strategies, you can present more detail on your change management plans.
It’s helpful if you match each of these types of strategic change plans to your noted objectives or deliverables that you’ve laid out in your playbook presentation. This makes creating this part of your strategic organizational change playbook easier for you to manage and it makes it more comprehensive.
When you detail your change management plans in your strategic playbook, remember that this is a change strategy example, not a full-blown plan. You’re explaining what you plan to do and later, you will develop a more detailed plan that lays out how you will do it.
These strategies for implementing organizational change should be more of an outline and can include preliminary information.
For example, when including details on your communication plan, you can include the channels you plan to use (email, intranet, webinar, etc.) the different groups you’ll be communicating with, and your flow of communications. You can even include a couple of strategic change management examples of communications you might send.
But you won’t need to have your entire communication schedule and every communication being issued mapped out yet. That will come later when you’re developing your full communications plan.
Depending upon the objectives and deliverables required for your project, you may provide strategies for a few, all, or some of these strategic change examples:
- Change Impact Assessment Plan
- Communication Plan
- Leadership/Stakeholder Engagement Plan
- Impacted Users’ (Target Audience) Engagement Plan
- Change Champions/Agents Network Plan
- Training Plan
- Coaching Plan
- Readiness & Change Success Criteria (KPI Tracking Plan)
- Risk/Resistance Mitigation Plan
- Change Normalization Plan
- Transition Plan
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Is there a best OCM strategy that you have used that you would like to share with other project managers and change leads? Please, reach out and let us know.
Next Steps for Your Change Management Playbook
You begin your playbook of organizational change management strategies by answering “What is change management strategy?” You should end with what you will do next with those organizational transformation strategies just presented.
Because you’ve just given a lot of strategy information for the different stages of change management in your OCM playbook, the logical way to close out is to provide an overview of your next steps. These next steps will explain how you’ll be translating that change management strategic playbook into action.
Use the final or one of the final slides in your strategic change management PDF, PPT, or cloud playbook to provide a bullet list of your next immediate steps.
Effective change management strategies need to be translated into change management plans, which they are deployed.
Example slide from OCM Solution Strategic Playbook explaining next steps to put organizational change management strategies into action.
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Change Management Playbook, Strategies & Samples | Everything You Need
This guide provides you with a step-by-step overview, and everything you need, including templates and samples for developing an end-to-end playbook for presenting your organizational change management strategies.
Are you looking for an easy way to present your deliverables and strategies for all your change management stages? Need to have an online tool that allows you to collaborate with others while outlining your strategies for implementing change?
We’ve designed a simple online cloud tool that you can use as a template. It includes change management strategy example slides full of content that you can easily edit, delete, or add to, according to your change project needs.
Why use the OCM Solution Change Management Strategic Playbook template?
- It’s absolutely free!
- You can use the playbook for up to 2 projects (more can be added for a small fee)
- Add other free users to your account for real-time collaboration
- Get graphs, charts, and images that you can edit with your information
- Leverage multiple slides of content to get your change management strategies outlined quickly
- A convenient online interface that you can access from anywhere
- Export your organizational change management strategy playbook to PDF or PowerPoint
- Get several other free tools along with your strategic playbook (change project roadmap, change management workflow, sponsor management toolkit, and more)
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Getting Started with OCM Solution Toolkits
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Click the button above to go to the registration page.
- Enter your contact details
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Once you’ve logged in, you’ll be taken to the Main Dashboard page. To begin using your free Toolkit(s), you would follow these steps:
- Create a new project.
- Name your project.
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- Check the box(es) to enable your purchased or free OCM Solution Toolkit(s) for that project.
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- Your OCM Solution Toolkits will be there on the Project Home Page waiting for you to dive in!
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Let us know if you have any questions about our free or paid online change and project management software.
Find More Change Readiness Resources:
- Change Impact Assessment Tool & Templates
- Change Readiness Assessment Tool & Templates
- Change Network Management Tool & Templates
- Stakeholder Engagement & Management Tool
- Change Champion Networks | Everything You Need to Know
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OCM Solution Free Change Management Strategy Playbook FAQs
What is change management strategy?
A change management strategy is a documentation of the strategy that you will use to design, develop, implement, and track your organizational change approach and key deliverables and activities.
The goal of an organizational change strategy is to facilitate a specific transformation or project that is being undertaken to guide the impacted individuals, teams, and groups through the change successfully.
Different types of change management strategies can be developed to address different types of organizational change.
What should be included in a change management strategy?
The results from your change management assessments to determine the types of strategic change impacts to the organization will be the core used to develop your organizational change strategies and playbook.
Some of the key elements will be an overview of the various strategies for implementing change, including:
1. Communicating with your impacted audience
2. Working with leaders and managers to ensure communications are cascaded down to the rest of their organizations
3. Establishing and managing a change champions network - very critical for increasing the success of the business change
4. Working with key managers and coaching them to more effectively support change management deliverables
5. Tracking and measuring your change management activities
6. Managing resistance
7. Training & reskilling change management stages
8. ....and many more
How do you compile a change management plan?
In the typical stages of change management, if you are using the OCM Solution Change Management Framework, the creation of your change management strategic playbook and your change management plan will both come during Phase 2 (Develop Phase).
But you will naturally develop your organizational change management strategic playbook first. Then you will leverage the playbook when developing your change management plan, which details how you will carry out your stated organizational change strategy.
Thus, you begin with the change management strategic playbook to compile a change management plan.
What are the five steps of change management?
It’s helpful if you use steps or phases to categorize the tasks and deliverables that need to be provided as part of your change management.
The OCM Solution Change Model uses five steps of change management that we refer to as “phases.” Each phase represents a different action that you take in sequence to deliver a successful change management project.
These five steps are:
• Phase 1: Assess
• Phase 2: Develop
• Phase 3: Deploy
• Phase 4: Normalize
• Phase 5: Exit
You can learn more about the 5-phase OCM Solution Change Management Framework here: OCM Solution Change Methodology and Approach (https://www.ocmsolution.com/change-management-approach/)
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