Stakeholders and Change Participants
Change participants are all those affected by the change. They will need to know the reasons behind the change as well as the intended effect on them and their working practices. They come under the umbrella term of stakeholders but a change may also have stakeholders who are not directly affected. For instance the funding bodies or governors may have a stake in seeing that a change is implemented but the change may not have any immediate impact on their working practices.
You will need to undertake some form of Stakeholder Analysis to help you plan the change. Identifying the key stakeholders and their influence on the change as well as potential resistance will assist in devising a programme that will address their concerns and fears, as well as identifying and dealing with potential conflicts. Follow this link for a Stakeholder Analysis template.
The purpose of this analysis is:
- To identify those that will be affected directly or indirectly by the change.
- To assess their interest, resistance and support for the change initiative.
- To identify and find a means of resolving any conflicts of interest (which if left undetected or unaddressed, might jeopardise the success of the change initiative).
- To encourage stakeholder ownership and participation in the change initiative.
- To facilitate partnership and co-operation between your institution and its stakeholders.
The key stakeholders are those who can influence (facilitate or hinder) the success of the change project, in many cases these people will also be change participants. It is however a feature of our environment that academics can often act as 'indirect stakeholders' where they feel that proposed changes are not in keeping with their culture and values.
Having identified your stakeholders the next stage is to concentrate on the change participants and consider for each sub-group of participants:
- The barriers to change - what reasons will this group give for not wanting to change. This is usually the easy bit.
- The levers to change - what are the factors which this group might see as beneficial about the change?
- How you can communicate with this group so you can respond to concerns and reinforce the positive messages.
- Finally - what action needs to be taken to lower barriers, reinforce the positive aspects (or these will become forgotten) and to communicate this effectively with the stakeholder group.
For large scale changes it may be worth undertaking some focus-group work or similar to see whether your intuition is matched by reality in these areas.
Some aspects of how change participants are affected by major change is provided in the Transition Management section.
Influencing
This is a key skill that needs to be considered in the planning stages, when carrying out your stakeholder analysis, and needs to be taken forward as part of the change implementation. JISC infoNet has produced some guidance on influencing others.
