Key Points
Organize your change success metrics or KPIs into three categories — completion, achievement, and satisfaction — to ensure you take a comprehensive view of the effectiveness of your change effort.
When articulating what success looks like, consider using a range rather than a single point. It is rare to achieve perfection, but progress is often quite doable.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by too many measures and too much data. Start simple, stay consistent and build your change measurement competency over time.
How will you know if your change initiative is a success or a failure? This is an essential question, yet many organizations fail to prepare themselves to adequately answer it. Using a simple, three-part framework, with related metrics, will help you to create an effective measurement strategy for your change management effort.
Use a multi-dimensional definition of success
It’s useful to define change success as multi-dimensional, rather than a singular thing you attain. In her research on the implementation of strategic decisions, Susan Miller offers a helpful framework for evaluating change implementation success, which includes consideration of three dimensions: completion, achievement, and acceptability.
It’s common for change managers to focus on one or two of these areas. However, each of these dimensions is necessary, but insufficient by itself to provide a complete evaluation of the success of the change effort. It’s essential to reflect on organizational change success using all three.
Achievement: How well did you realize the intended results of the change?
It’s important to measure achievement— what benefits did the change produce — to avoid confusing activity with results. It’s also useful to break down achievement into its component parts, particularly for transformational change projects that are implemented over several years.
First, define the vision or ultimate outcome(s) you desire from the change. Put simply: where do you want to end up? How will things be significantly different? Is this change mainly about enhancing quality, growth or efficiency, etc. ? This will only be measurable once the change is in place and functioning for a period of time.
Second, define mid-term achievements. For instance, are the change management key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you determine if you are on the path to achieving your vision? These are early indicators that show a) if people are using the change you have implemented consistently and b) how good they at new behaviors, skills, and practices required by the change. These are measurable after the change has been in use for a while.
Finally, define short-term outputs. These are usually related to adoption of the change ( product, policy, program, process, structure) rather how well people use it. These metrics are the first things you can measure.
Completion: How well did you manage execution?
Change completion measures often relate to project management for developing and rolling out the change solution or product (e.g., schedule, scope, budget). These may also include planned vs actual execution of change management practices, such as communications, training, etc. Change completion measures are important because you can’t implement a change that doesn’t exist and people usually need some support to adopt the change. So you’ll want to monitor if these types of things are getting done.
Acceptability: How satisfied are stakeholders with the change solution, process, and outcomes?
Measure change acceptability to gauge how people view the effectiveness of the change management process and how people in your organization perceive the product of the change. Is the change worth it to them?
You are usually measuring perceptions in this category, which you gather through some type of survey or feedback mechanism. It’s ideal to measure stakeholder perceptions throughout the life of the change initiative, as this feedback can help you to improve your efforts to support adoption as well as the quality of what you are implementing. Also, perceptions often change over the life of the change effort.
Define success as a range, rather than a point
Given that we will rarely reach perfection on any of these dimensions, it can be useful to think about change success on a spectrum. (Rather than as all or nothing.) Consider evaluating each of the change success dimensions using a graduated scale or range of success (e.g, what is ideal versus what is acceptable?) Doing so can support greater insight and a more accurate evaluation of organizational change success.
Change Measurement Framework and Change Metric Examples
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Lay the groundwork for measurement at the start of the change initiative
As you begin to think about how you’ll define and measure the success of your organizational change effort, you’ll quickly recognize that assessing performance against these dimensions requires information. You need to lay a strong foundation for change measurement, including a clear vision for what the change should accomplish and a plan and timeframes for developing the change solution and rolling it out.
Further, it’s easy to make assumptions about what completion is, if you don’t define it clearly. “All teams will be using the process by the end of the year” is one definition. However, you’ll likely have a better sense of actual completion and shared understanding if you get more specific. For example: “25 teams will have documented completion of three required process steps by December 31st.”
Finally, it’s hard to remain objective if you create these measures and targets near the end of your change management efforts. Develop your metrics, and the methods you’ll use to collect and analyze data, during the planning phase of the change. One caveat — for long-term changes you may not know enough at the start of the effort to determine appropriate targets. In such cases, you can collect baseline data and adjust as you learn throughout the life of the implementation.
Use your measures to identify ares for growth and improvement in your change management approach.
Taking a multi-dimensional approach to assessing change performance will position you to learn about your change management effectiveness in a more nuanced way.
Reflecting on what you are seeing in the measures can help you more accurately target areas for improvement over time. If you use this simple, three-part change measurement framework for a number of organizational changes, you may begin to see performance trends. This insight can help you to focus improvement efforts on the most relevant skill areas for you and your change management team. For instance, project management skills may be needed if most implementations run behind schedule, or communications and engagement skills may need a boost if acceptability scores are low.
Be consistent
Creating new things is exciting. However, when we shift how we evaluate success each time we start implementing a new strategy or organizational change initiative, we miss the opportunity to build a body of knowledge about our organizational capacity for change management. The simplicity of the three change success dimensions makes it adaptable to many types of changes. Using it consistently will help you to build a rich understanding of your team, department, or organization’s implementation skill set, without spending all of your time on evaluation.
Interested in learning more about good practices in implementation? I invite you to check out my book, The Implementer's Starter Kit!
References
Miller, Susan, (1997)“Implementing Strategic Decisions: Four Key Success Factors.” Organization Studies. 18, pp. 577-602. Note: The findings of this research are based on a small number of case studies (11 decisions in 6 organizations.)
This article was originally published on June 16, 2016. It was updated on July 20, 2020.