13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring

Sub-step 1.3: Undertaking a gap analysis

The McKinsey 7-S model can be used to undertake a gap analysis. When assessing the current ('as is') and the future organisational context ('to be'), it is important to ensure that the change activities address and support the identified 'gap' and any 'barriers' to the change.

The method is straightforward: describe each of the seven elements as it is today, describe each as it needs to be after the change, and the difference is the gap the change must close.

The discipline the test imposes is that every gap needs a change activity, and every change activity should be traceable to a gap. Activities with no gap behind them are waste; gaps with no activity against them are where the change will fail. Working the table both ways is one of the fastest quality checks available on a change plan.

Sub-step 1.4: Determining impact profiles

Understanding who is impacted and how is essential to effective change management. Individuals and groups will experience their own change journeys, affecting people in different ways and by differing amounts.

Having identified, segmented and mapped stakeholder groups:

• The change team will look to gain an awareness of individual impact profiles by co-defining this with stakeholders
• They will use this awareness to customise communication, engagement and learning interventions to support change readiness. This could be as part of defining the size and scale of the change, creating the vision, or other discovery activities

Co-defining rather than assessing

The word co-defining carries real weight. Impact profiles are built with stakeholders, not about them. There are three reasons this is better than desk assessment:

1. Accuracy. People know their own work. The change team's model of what a role involves is always simpler than the role.
2. Legitimacy. An impact profile a group helped construct is one they will not dispute later.
3. Engagement. Co-defining is itself an engagement activity — it protects autonomy in SCARF terms and moves people up the commitment escalator while producing the analysis.

Using the profiles

The purpose is to customise communication, engagement and learning interventions. This is what makes segmentation operational: a group with a heavy skills impact and light process impact needs a different intervention mix from a group with the reverse. Without profiles, change teams deliver the same intervention set to everyone and are surprised by uneven adoption.

Monitoring impact profiles

Change managers or change teams will establish feedback loops and monitor impact profiles over time. As the change network identifies new impacts or stakeholder groups, the profile may change.

CM3 adds an important governance point: regularly reviewing who participates in this process also mitigates the risk of group think and bias, promoting constructive challenge. A standing group that assesses impacts for eighteen months converges on a shared view and stops seeing what it has stopped looking for. Rotating participation is a cheap corrective.

Feedback loops and discovery techniques

The examples CM3 gives:

The last row is worth dwelling on. System data measures what people do rather than what they say, and it is often already being collected. Task completion time stamps, for example, show the learning dip directly: completion times rise after go-live and fall as competence builds. If they do not fall, something is wrong that no survey would have revealed.

The strongest monitoring uses both — qualitative sources to explain what is happening and quantitative sources to establish that it is. This anticipates the change analytics material, where the mix of qualitative and quantitative data shifts across the change lifecycle.