Creating your own Change Heatmap

What is a Change Heatmap, and why would you use it?

A Change Heatmap provides an organisation or a large business unit with a total or Enterprise view of the people impacted by all projects. It provides leadership teams/executives and project or change management offices (PMOs and CMOs) a total picture of the critical impacts on teams or business units over time and, most importantly, shows how it can be used to make decisions around these impacts.

The tool is designed to aid in planning and communication, promoting engagement and facilitating decision making. If not properly utilized and kept up-to-date, it becomes a useless piece of paper. It also supports effective change governance and provides a broad overview of the change's effects, with the option for further detail if desired. Both advanced tools and basic/intermediate excel spreadsheets can be used to display the information. Additionally, it can help manage change fatigue by adjusting the pace of implementation.

Some rules from me

• The Heatmap MUST be a living document – you can't do it once and then never again.
• You need to commit resources – project members, change managers and the business or a centralised team need to keep it up to date, and if you don't or can't do this - then don't do it!
• It MUST have a place that allows the reporting and other information you take from it to flow into some governance forum – typically a change governance forum, or at least a program/enterprise PMO or something similar.

How do you start?

Get clear on the resourcing - how you manage the updates and who will do what

It takes commitment – so get clear on the end-to-end process of how you will handle it and who will do what.

Be clear on what you will track in it

The scope of the information included is crucial - should it cover all projects, some projects, or just major business as usual activities? The more information that is included, the more valuable the insights obtained will be.

Enterprise-Wide or Business Unit Wide?

Enterprise-wide is better because you have a total system view and can drill down from there. However, the more extensive your organisation is, the more complex the Heatmap is, likely meaning you would benefit from it. It takes commitment, governance, and resourcing, AND I would suggest a more sophisticated tool.

Be clear on your impact measurement and dimensions

For instance, will the scale be categorized as low, medium, high or use a five-point scale, or will it be linked to an existing risk measurement scale within the organization, since we are measuring people risk. Additionally, do you plan to use color coding? Regardless of the chosen scale, it is important to ensure that everyone understands how to properly apply the scales, as unclear markings can result in irrelevant data.

Governance

There must be a place where you can legitimately take this information and present it to a committee, executive, leadership team or governance forum where the data is discussed. Decisions can be made around ‘hot spots’.

Tool

Be clear on the tool you need. Will you build from excel, use access or use a purpose-built tool? I have seen versions of Excel, SharePoint, and Microsoft BI used with some success. Be clear on what makes sense for the organisation's size, the level of sophistication of the organisational hierarchy, and the reporting you need. You need to understand if you will build one or buy one.

And here is a pitch from me

If you require something with a user-friendly interface, strong reporting capabilities, and is tailored to your needs, reach out to us, and we will demonstrate what we have to offer. However, before making a purchase, be sure to have completed all of the steps before this. I have seen organisations spend money, not have my previously mentioned points in place and waste time and money.

Those are the main things we think you need to know. You can stop reading here, but just in case, we have listed some of the things we have seen go wrong below (which are the reverse of the points above to get it right).

What have I seen go wrong?

• No resources in place to keep it updated – we had a client that had one person build a great excel version and then got laboured with the one change manager having to update it all and compromised the ability to keep it updated going forward – created a rod for her own back!
• People disagree on the impact measurements, so different projects are rating things differently – you need to ensure quality process around this
• Not all key projects were captured, meaning the organisation was able to get some sense of impact but missed some critical impacts from other projects that refused to take part
• Nowhere to take data – we experienced a team do a fantastic job and literally have nowhere to take the data to get some decisions made that needed to be made to delay some implementations
• Not getting clear on the level of organisational hierarchy to map down to – total business unit level might be too high – but down at team level might be way too much time/effort if your organisation has perhaps 7-8 layers.

I hope this has been helpful. Don't hesitate to contact us here if you want to discuss further, need assistance with implementation, or would like to learn more about how we can support you through our processes and tools.