Plan

Planning is an important part of the change process. Begin by outlining what you want to accomplish and developing a shared vision/mission that reflects all members of the organization. This stage also involves assessing and analyzing your organization’s structure, people and processes to identify strengths and weaknesses, understand your organization’s readiness for change and learn what skills and competencies your organization will need to implement the change initiative. Getting buy-in at this stage is crucial and could involve getting leadership on board, identifying champions and involving employees at all levels in developing a plan. It is also important to develop a concrete implementation plan and secure the resources required to implement the plan.

Methods and Tools for PLAN stage

Action Plans outline specific activities/projects to use to work toward an organization’s objectives. They help support activity/project planning, including timelines, roles, accountability, outcomes/deliverables and milestones.

Balanced Scorecards help align an organization’s operations with its vision by linking short-term activities with long-term goals and objectives.

Budget Planning resources help organizations to think systematically about the costs associated with a project. Cost estimations for each activity can be determined through research, experience or consultation with stakeholders.

The CFIR-ERIC Implementation Strategy Matching Tool guides users in choosing an implementation strategy based on the results of a context assessment. The tool maps 73 implementation strategies from the “Expert Recommendations for Implementing Change (ERIC)” to the “CFIR constructs.”

The Change Assessment Instrument explores an organization’s readiness for change.

The Change Readiness Survey assesses readiness for organizational change prior to a change effort with the goal of ensuring sustainability of communication protocols after initial implementation.

The Change Survey Before Implementation of Change seeks participants’ opinions on the clarity and anticipated impact of the change goals, along with planning and implementation of the change processes. It can also be used during the implementation of change and/or as part of the follow-up and evaluation of change.

The CNE/CNO Governance and Leadership Self-Assessment identifies personal areas of strength and potential growth related to competency, confidence and consistency as they relate to governance, leadership and practice behaviours.

The Collaborative Leadership Self-Assessment Questionnaires assess collaborative leadership capacity by looking at the key behaviours related to six practices of effective collaborative leaders: assessing the environment, creating clarity, building trust, sharing power and influence, developing people and self-reflection.

The Practical Resource for Communication outlines effective communication practices to help improve health services and/or change practice based on research results. It includes guidance on how to create a communicate plan, how to consider language, checking work for content and formatting, and considering how best to present information.

The Competing Values Culture Assessment (also known as the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI)) assesses six dimensions of organizational culture to identify an organization’s values and the fundamental assumptions under which the organization operates.

The Conditions for Workplace Effectiveness Questionnaires (CWEQ I and CWEQ II) measure the concept of structural empowerment. They can be used to assess employees’ access to opportunity, information, support and resources.

The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) outlines constructs and approaches for identifying implementation factors that can affect the transferability of findings for a particular intervention. It includes five key domains: intervention characteristics, outer setting, inner setting, characteristics of individuals and process.

A Continuum of Commitment Analysis provides insights into where stakeholders stand in relation to their commitment to a change initiative. This added level of detail allows for discussion of what sort of influence leaders might need to exert in order for stakeholders to move along the continuum.

The Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI) measures key internal organizational factors that influence a firm’s entrepreneurial activities and outcomes, such as top management support, work discretion, rewards/reinforcement, time availability and organizational boundaries.

The Critical to Quality (CTQ) Tree helps establish specific and measurable requirements of a new program, product or service that must exist to meet key stakeholder needs.

The Cultiv8 process highlights the importance of cultivating trust and navigating power dynamics to support effective change. The process includes three steps: assessing the context, reflecting on contributions and selecting trust and power actions.

The Customer Identification worksheet helps identify customer groups and needs. It identifies what data and/or measures should be collected to establish if customers’ needs are being met.

The Delphi Technique helps achieve consensus through consultation with experts in the field. Experts are recruited as panelists and go through multiple rounds of anonymous questionnaires. Responses are aggregated and shared after each round.

Driver Diagrams (also known as Tree Diagrams) outline a path between the project activities, drivers and organizational goals to show the causes and intended effects of a change effort.

The Facilitators and Barriers: Questions to Guide You chart helps planning teams raise questions around implementation to identify facilitators and barriers in order to develop strategies for overcoming barriers.

Flowcharts show the flow of events in a work process and allow comparison of the actual process to an ideal process. They can be used to identify areas with complexity, redundancy, variation or gaps in the flow of events in order to explore ways to improve the process.

The Focused Conversation method is a structured set of questions to support individuals and groups through a phased reflection on any issue occurring in their team, department or organization. It enables individuals and groups to process their thoughts in an orderly manner.

Force Field Analysis uses collective decision making to prioritize driving forces that can be strengthened and restraining forces that can be eliminated to obtain the ideal state of an issue.

Gantt Charts help show the tasks and timeline of a project and who is assigned to what task. They can also be used to communicate plans and project status and support scheduling and monitoring of tasks.

The Health and Safety Climate Survey (INPUTS™) assesses organizational culture by measuring employee perceptions of the physical and psychosocial work environment.

The Healthcare Leader's Change Checklist provides a series of 10 questions to consider when approaching a change initiative to explore potential facilitators and barriers to a change or improvement effort.

The Human Resource (HR) Flexibility Scale measures firm level skills, employee behaviour and HR practice flexibility. The developers suggest that skill, employee behaviour and HR practice flexibility may be associated with greater firm financial performance.

The Human Resource Management (HRM) Focus Scale provides a series of questions to assess if managers are in tune with employee needs and perceptions.

The Impact-Effort Matrix assesses the level of effort required to implement a potential solution and weighs it against its potential to meet the organization’s objectives in order to prioritize actions and next steps.

The Individual Innovative Behaviour Scale assesses innovative behaviour, performance outcome expectations and perceived organization support for innovation.

The Inner Setting Measures from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) assesses measures related to the seven Inner Setting domain constructs, including culture, climate, leadership engagement and available resources.

The Kano Model helps prioritize customer needs and requirements by grouping them into three categories: Expected/Must Haves, Nice to Have/Normal and Exciters/Delighters.

The King’s Improvement Science (KIS) template supports the planning and evaluation of quality improvement projects in health and social care services.

The Learning Orientation Scale measures an organization’s learning orientation by assessing its commitment to learning, shared vision and open-mindedness.

Logic Models help link activities, outcomes and goals of large-scale change efforts and provide a rationale for an organization’s existing activities. They also help plan new approaches to achieve an organization’s goals and can assist in evaluating changes that have been implemented.

The Measure of Social Capital at Work assesses social capital in the workplace and indicates whether people feel they are respected, valued and treated as equals at work.

Multiple Cause Diagrams help identify and illustrate the causal connections between influential factors for a situation or a problem occurring within an organization.

The Organizational Culture Assessment Questionnaire (OCAQ) assesses an organization’s culture and highlights any culture-based problems that may exist.

The Organizational Readiness for Change (ORC) assessment instrument focuses on motivation and personality attributes of program leaders and staff, institutional resources and organizational climate. It helps users understand organizational factors related to implementing new technologies in a program.

The Organizational Readiness for Implementing Change (ORIC) Instrument assesses determinants and consequences of organizational readiness for change.

The Perceived Organization Support for Innovation scale assesses innovative behaviour, performance outcome expectations and perceived organization support for innovation.

The Person-Organization Fit Scales assess and monitor employees’ perceptions of fit, or compatibility, with an organization. Items include personal and organizational value fit (perceived fit), personal and organizational identity fit (organizational identification), perceived organizational support, supervisor’s perception of frontline worker citizenship (citizenship behaviours), turnover decisions, job satisfaction, career satisfaction, occupational commitment, job performance and pay raise.

Planning Questions for Large Scale Change help guide initial and ongoing programming and service planning.

Power Mapping looks at the relationships between organizations and people to identify key influencers for input or support.

Prioritization Matrices help organizations make decisions by systematically comparing choices using specific criteria and weighting options based on importance.

Quality Improvement Decision resources help teams brainstorm project ideas and determine the feasibility of projects.

The World Café helps create an environment to engage in collaborative dialogue on important and complex issues. This method outlines how to tailor communication to meet individual/team/organization goals.

Ralph Stacey’s Agreement & Certainty Matrix is an approach for making decisions based on the degree of certainty and level of agreement concerning an issue.

The 7 Strategies for Improving HITECH Readiness include building awareness, investing in a transformation infrastructure, building expertise, developing a business intelligence strategy, investing in infrastructure, exploring information exchange and designing an engagement strategy.

SMART Objectives help plan for and measure meaningful objectives that accurately reflect progress toward an organization’s goals. A SMART objective is one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) helps map relationships in an organization’s work environment. It is used to examine the network structure prior to, during and/or after the implementation of a change intervention.

Stakeholder Analysis helps identify and understand key people who will be affected by a project. Change efforts should consider key stakeholder levels of commitment/support for a change and their potential influence before undertaking a project.

The Team Climate Inventory (TCI) measures climate for innovation within groups in a workplace setting, including vision, participative safety, task orientation and support for innovation.

Twelve Questions to Measure the Strength of a Workplace assess the key characteristics of strong workplaces.

Vision/Mission Analysis can be used by organizations to help develop clear vision and mission statements to unify the values of external and internal stakeholders.

The Walt Disney Circle (aka the Circle of Creativity) divides the planning process for individual, team or organizational projects into three stages: the Dreamer, the Realist and the Critic. It can help refine both personal and organizational goals.

The What is Your Organization’s Culture? questionnaire can be used by management to assess measures of sociability and solidarity. Balancing these two dimensions is important in an organization as they improve satisfaction, foster creativity and reinstate a shared purpose among employees. The questionnaire consists of 14 items that are ranked on a scale of “low,” “medium,” or “high.”

Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) visually break down projects or initiatives into smaller, more manageable deliverables.