TABLE OF CONTENTS When planning a strategic change initiative, it is never too early to think about evaluation. Developing a change management plan requires many decisions to be made about the timing of deployment activities, the sequence of business units or functions that will be involved in the deployment, and the scope of the deployment. These decisions have implications for how the change initiative can be evaluated. More important, building evaluation activities into the change plan opens new doors to understanding and increasing the value of the change for the business. Developing the change plan and the evaluation plan together optimizes the value of both.
Let's get to the crux of the issue: isolation. Understanding how the change initiative adds value to the organization requires that the effects of the change initiative be reasonably isolated from all other potential influences. We say reasonably isolated because this is not an exact science. Judgments are made. Estimations are taken. More than 80 years of empirical research in the social and behavioral sciences provide tried-and-true evaluation methodology that can be adapted to isolating the effects of a change initiative. For more than 20 years, pioneers like Jack Phillips have adapted evaluation methodology to a variety of training and human resource development programs. It is high time to routinely extend this methodology to strategic change initiatives.
Later in this chapter we talk about various strategies to isolate the effects of the change initiative. Optimizing these strategies will be done through the...
