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TSI Services

Change Readiness Assessment


Overview

Numerous studies, including several published in The Harvard Business Review, CIO Magazine and others, confirm that organizations desiring to implement sustainable change must first have an environment that is suitable for such change.

Transforming Solutions Inc. (TSI), supports these beliefs and uses the following criteria with our clients to help assess how “fit” and ready an organization is for process improvement/redesign/re-engineering and/or organizational change.

This assessment tool can be used in several ways including evaluating the perspective of several individuals (especially at various levels and positions) in your organization, measuring the readiness for change over time, as well measuring risk before exerting the effort and resources on a large change/process improvement initiative.

Instructions

Rank your organization on a scale from 1-10 (10 = highest possible) in each of the following categories defined below. Giving a score of "10" means that your organization meets or exceeds the description ALL of the time. A "1" would mean that your group is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum NEVER exhibiting these characteristics. 

Once you have filled in the rankings, you can see your score by clicking on the Calculate Your Score button below.  This will also show you the meaning of  your score.

Ranking

1. Executive Leadership and Support

The organization is led by an executive who strongly and publicly supports the change initiative. The executive must be actively engaged with the change initiative in setting its direction, providing vision, co-creating recommendations and continually supporting the deployment of those recommendations.

2. Capacity to change

The organization is adequately staffed to pursue a change initiative project from its initial planning stage through implementation. Full time (or close to it) resources are deployed on the project and other responsibilities take a “back seat” for those individuals.

3. Predisposition toward improvement

The organization has an inherent tendency to want to examine and improve itself. The Project Team is constructively critical of the problem area and regardless of its training in process improvement or organizational development, instinctively knows that it should be operating in a significantly better way. The organization also has had success implementing significant process improvement/change initiatives within the last several years.

4. Clarity of destination

The change initiative project has a crystal clear defined operating model and vision that is shared throughout the project team. This vision should define how it would like to function in their “new” environment.

5. Funding to implement change

Since change requires resources and at times additional capital, the organization must have adequate resources to staff the project and implement the short and long-term recommendations. This can be achieved by either directly providing all resources, sharing resources from other groups/departments or employing the use of contractors/consultants.

6. Alignment of the project’s improvement objectives with a higher level organizational mission and objectives

Sustaining change requires alignment at multiple levels. At the highest level, alignment is required between the direction the organization is pursuing (e.g., relative to its competitors, within their industry…) and how this change initiative supports and enables the pursuit of this direction tactically. Secondly, alignment needs to exist between the goals and objectives of the project and the individuals, values on the project, and in the organization as a whole.

Score

Using a grading scale of 90/80/70/60% we have found the following to be true about a project or initiative’s predictability for success.

Score What it means
54 or better You are in the upper 10% of all companies who begin major change initiatives. You are well positioned to be successful. Keep these elements in check and you will, in all likelihood, be happy with your results.
48 - 53 You meet the baseline level for an adequate, but by no means ideal, environment. If any of these six factors decrease, the project is in the “danger zone”.
42 - 47 You face a very risky endeavor. This project is probably worth waiting on unless you have a very strong Executive Sponsor, the right resources on the project and have indications that other factors will quickly improve.
Less than 42 You may want to save yourself the time and frustration and wait until more of these six factors improve dramatically.



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