Change Management Strategies for Change Managers with FREE Templates (OCM Strategy Playbooks, Plans, and Guides)
Best Change Management Strategy Playbook Templates with Strategic Change Examples and Guide
This free guide equips you with all the essential tools for effectively executing end-to-end organizational change management strategies, activities, and deliverables. It includes free change management strategic playbook templates that you can use for planning, implementing, and tracking the success of your business change strategy and change management activities.
Prior to crafting a successful change management plan, it’s imperative to document your organizational change management strategy. This involves delineating your actions for each phase of the change management project, encompassing the various strategic change plans you intend to implement.
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Before you can even begin to put together an effective change management plan, you need to document your organizational change management strategy. This involves outlining what you are going to do in each of the change management stages of the project, including the types of strategic change plans you will implement.
When should you develop your strategy and change management strategic playbook? You will typically do this after you’ve conducted your change management assessments. Assessments are typically done in Phase 1 of a strategic change management process and the development of a strategic playbook is done in Phase 2.
The change impact assessment, organizational readiness analysis, risk assessment, and other change assessments that you perform will provide output that will be used to create the change management tactics and OCM strategy playbook explaining your strategies for implementing change.
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In this article, we’ll provide an overview of organizational change management strategies and what is typically included when creating strategic change examples for your playbook deliverable. We’ll also look at the answer to, “What is change management strategy” with a detailed overview of the key things to include in your change management strategic playbook.
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Table of Contents – FREE Strategic Change Management Playbook Templates
Keep on scrolling down this page to read each section or click any link below to go directly to that section.
1. List of FREE OCMS Change Management Strategic Playbook Templates & Resources
2. What Is a Change Management Strategy?
3. What Is a Change Management Strategy as Compared to a Change Management Plan?
4. What is a Change Management Playbook?
5. Difference Between the OCM Benefits Realization Plan and Strategic Change Playbook
6. What Should You Include in Your Change Management Strategic Playbook?
7. Change Management Strategic Framework for Change Practitioners
8. Best Change Management Deliverables
9. Overview of Impacted Organizations & Job Roles
10. Overview of Key Change Management Objectives
11. Overview of Your Various Change Management Plans
12. Next Steps for Your Change Management Playbook
13. Change Management Playbook, Strategies & Samples | Everything You Need
14. OCM Solution Free Change Management Strategy Playbook FAQs
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Please reach out and let us know. Continue reading below to learn all about free change management strategic playbook templates that has been leveraged by thousands of change management practitioners, project managers, program leads, and HR staff.
List of Free OCMS Change Management Strategic Playbook Templates & Resources
Explore our curated list of free OCMS Change Management Strategic Playbook Templates & Resources, featuring valuable tools and guides to empower your organization in effectively navigating change initiatives.
1. FREE OCM Strategic Playbook & Plan Templates
OCM Solution, a leading provider of organizational change management resources, offers two valuable OCM Strategic Playbook & Plan Templates for free to assist organizations in effectively managing change initiatives. These OCM strategy playbook templates are designed to streamline the process of planning, executing, and monitoring organizational change strategies. In the sections below, we’ll go through some of the key features of change management strategic playbook FREE templates.
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2. FREE OCM Benefits Realization Plan
Our FREE OCM Benefits Realization Plan template is a strategic blueprint that delineates the necessary steps and procedures for guaranteeing that the anticipated advantages of a specific change or project are effectively attained within an organization. This plan holds pivotal significance within the realm of change management, serving as a tool to enable organizations to monitor, quantify, and ultimately attain the desired results of a change endeavor.
Find out more about the key features of OCM Benefits Realization Plan later on in the article.
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3. FREE OCM Strategic Playbook Guide
Our OCM Strategic PDF Playbook Guide is a comprehensive resource designed to assist organizations in developing and implementing their Organizational Change Management (OCM) strategies effectively.
This organizational change management strategy guide serves as a roadmap for crafting a well-structured plan to manage change within an organization.
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What Is a Change Management Strategy?
Essentially, a change strategy is a comprehensive document outlining the approach you intend to utilize for designing, developing, executing, and monitoring your organizational change initiative along with its key activities and outcomes.
The primary objective of an organizational change strategy is to facilitate the successful navigation of a specific transformation or project, guiding individuals, teams, and groups affected by the change. Various types of change management strategies can be devised to address different organizational change scenarios.
For instance, consider an OCM strategy tailored for a major change with widespread impacts, such as a corporate merger. In this scenario, the organizational change strategies employed would need to be robust, encompassing elements like training, coaching, and thorough stakeholder engagement and resistance management.
Conversely, in other change management strategy instances, you might encounter projects with minimal impact, perhaps affecting only one job role, such as a revision in invoicing procedures. In such cases, a more modest OCM strategy tailored to the specific scope of the change would be deployed.
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It’s important to note that strategies for managing change will vary based on factors like:
- the project’s nature,
- its effects on individuals and groups, and
- various other considerations.
Nonetheless, there are certain change management tactics common to all strategies for implementing organizational change, such as effective communication with target audiences and proactive/reactive measures to address stakeholder resistance. With our OCM Strategic Playbook Guide PDF in hand, organizations can get a great understanding of:
- Why you need a change management strategic playbook
- Key components of a change strategy playbook
- How to implement strategic change management playbook
This comprehensive resource empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of change management with confidence, ensuring that they not only survive but thrive in an ever-evolving landscape.
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What Is a Change Management Strategy as Compared to a Change Management Plan?
What’s the difference between an organizational change management strategy and a change management plan?
- A strategy outlines what actions you intend to take
- A change management plan precisely documents how you will execute the actions outlined in your change strategy.
Here are change management strategy examples vs change management plan examples:
Change Strategy Example
Change Team:”Upon implementing the change, we will deliver weekly communications to enhance awareness and provide status updates.”
Change Strategy Example
Change Team: “We will formulate comprehensive communication and training plans to educate Sales, Finance, Operations, and Manufacturing teams across various regions, including the US, Canada, India, UK, Europe, Africa, and Asia.”
Developing and executing any of the above plans, as strategized by the Change Team, constitutes a “change management plan.“
In the typcal stages of change management, using the OCM Solution Change Management Framework, both the creation of your change management strategic playbook and your change management plan will occur in Phase 2 (Develop Phase).
Naturally, you will first develop your organizational change management strategies and strategic playbook. Next, you will leverage these organizational change approach resources when formulating your change management plan, which articulates the precise steps for implementing your stated organizational change strategy.
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What is a Change Management Strategic Playbook?
A change management strategic playbook summarizes your change management communication, training, stakeholder engagement, resistance management, and other strategies for implementing change.
Strategic change process playbook provides an overview of the scope and scale of the change impacts, and the change methodologies that will be applied, as well as a review of the impacted groups, processes, geographical regions, and legacy tools that will be changed.
A strategic organizational change management strategic playbook is sometimes referred to as a “business readiness playbook” for getting an organization ready to transition from a current state to a future target state.
Other sections of the strategic change management PDF or PPT playbook present insights on your target audience analysis (job roles and functions that are impacted by the change).
In general, a change management strategic playbook provides an overview of the various organizational transformation strategies that will be used for:
- Communicating with your impacted audience (Communications Planning)
- Working with leaders and managers to ensure communications are cascaded down to the rest of their organizations (Stakeholder Management)
- Establishing and managing a change champions network – very critical for increasing the success of the business change (Change Champion Networks)
- Working with key managers and coaching them to more effectively support change management deliverables (Coaching Plan)
- Tracking and measuring your change management activities (strategic change process for metrics tracking)
- Managing resistance (Resistance Management Plan)
- Training & re-skilling change management stages (Training Planning)
- ….and many more
The strategic change management playbook is also often used to familiarize key stakeholders, firm leaders, project resources, and program leads with the strategies for dealing with change and framework being leveraged for the program.
What is the Difference Between the OCM Benefits Realization Plan and Strategic Change Playbook?
The OCM Benefits Realization Plan is a tactical document that concentrates on a specific project or change initiative.
Its primary objective is to outline the strategies, metrics, and actions required to ensure that the anticipated benefits associated with that particular initiative are realized.
This plan typically has a narrow scope and is closely tied to the duration of the project it pertains to, focusing on short-to-medium-term goals and metrics. It is highly specific and targeted, often involving project teams and benefit owners as its primary stakeholders.
Change Strategy Example – Sample from OCM Solution’s FREE OCM Benefits Realization Plan
The Strategic Playbook, in contrast, is a broader, long-term guide that outlines the overall strategy for managing change within an organization. It covers multiple projects, addresses strategic aspects, and caters to a wider range of stakeholders.
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What Should You Include in Your Change Management Strategic Playbook?
The findings (output) from your assessments to determine the types of strategic change impacts happening throughout the organization will be the core used to develop your end-to-end organizational change strategies and playbook.
If you look at the stages of change management in the OCM Solution change model, you’ll find that conducting these assessments is one of the first things you do, which is why this activity is included in Phase 1 (Assess Phase).
Once you have these assessments, you’re ready to move onto Phase 2 (Develop Phase) and use them to create your strategies to implement change that you document in your change management strategic playbook.
Depending upon the scope and scale of the program, here are some of the assessments that will be used to develop your change management strategy examples:
- Project Assessment
- Change impact assessment
- Stakeholder analysis
- Organizational readiness assessment
- Program and change risks assessment
- Target audience analysis
- Organizational culture assessment (if culture change is needed)
Every project is unique, and strategic change management examples need to be customized to reflect the scope and scale of the change management deliverables that will be designed, developed, and executed for this project.
If your project includes a change that will severely impact business groups, or if the project is running into a lot of resistance, then to be effective change management strategies should emphasize a more comprehensive change management approach.
For example, for a large-scale project or a project that impacts users that aren’t very receptive to change, you will want to communicate more, use different communication channels, as well as implement a proactive and a reactive resistance management plan to mitigate resistance.
In addition, you will want to increase your engagement activities with end-users and stakeholder leaders to increase awareness, and build an overall desire to support the change.
Whether you are in the UK or Australia and creating an organisational change strategy or in another country, the strategic change process will be similar. It will be dictated by the project requirements and scope of the impacts on the organizational groups and end-users.
In the following sections, we will provide you with the key components to include in your change management strategy PDF or PPT playbook.
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The OCM Solution Strategic Playbook is full of change management strategies examples to get you started. You can edit the text, add your own images, add or remove slides, and much more!
Gain valuable insights to help you in creating your organizational transformation strategies.
We include charts, images, and data insights to guide you in how to summarize your assessment findings and types of change management strategies. Using these different mediums to present your strategies for dealing with change allows senior leaders to better digest the information.
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Change Management Strategic Framework for Change Practitioners
One of the components you should include in your OCM strategy playbook is the change approach or change management framework you intend to use to govern your strategic change process.
You may be using a singular approach in your strategies for implementing organizational change (such as the OCM Solution Change Management Framework or the Prosci ADKAR® Model). Or you may be using a combination of different approaches to guide your strategy and change management activities.
If you use our free change strategy example playbook, you’ll already have the information you need if using the OCM Solution Change Approach.
The OCM Solution change framework is a 5-phase change model that uses a “manage by deliverables” approach for implementing change management.
The phases categorize the change management deliverables & tasks needed to conduct a successful change project from start to finish. This methodology allows the freedom to accomplish those deliverables in the way the change team feels is most optimized. Learn more about this OCM strategy here.
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Best Change Management Deliverables
To accomplish the strategic change management examples laid out in your playbook, you will need deliverables. Change management deliverables are a tangible or intangible good or service that is required to be delivered during the change management stages as part of your plan.
The deliverables included in your strategies to implement change will vary depending upon the types of change management strategies needed to match the scope, scale, and impacts of the project.
Strategic change examples of deliverables would be a stakeholder assessment, a readiness status report, or the deployment of your change management communication plan.
It’s helpful when creating your playbook for your organizational change management strategies to be listed by change management phase, aka your stages of change management activities.
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Overview of Impacted Organizations & Job Roles
As we mentioned earlier, your change impact assessments and other key assessments, such as stakeholder assessment, organizational readiness assessment, and target audience assessment all help you plan your change management strategy example playbook.
Effective change management strategies need to be molded to the results of the impact assessments which tell you which groups, roles, and individuals are being impacted, how severely they’re being impacted, and how receptive they may or may not be to the change.
Whether you are creating an organisational change strategy (UK spelling) for a large change or developing change management tactics for a smaller transformation, you need to have your change assessment results as a key highlight in your change management strategic playbook.
Be sure to use different types of graphs and visualizations to present the data comprehensively.
Screenshots from the Free OCM Solution playbook with change management strategy examples.
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Learn more about the change risk matrix and how to do a change risk assessment for your strategy and change management tactics.
Overview of Key Change Management Objectives
What is change management strategy? The heart of that answer should be included in your overview of change management objectives. This is where you provide the key areas of change management that you intend to deliver for the project.
This could include things like delivering a training plan, providing timely awareness communications, working with managers to coach them on the organizational change approach, and other key objectives.
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Because this is an overview, you don’t have to provide a detailed explanation of each objective in your change management strategy PDF or PPT. Instead, you can provide just a few sentences that explain what the objective covers.
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Further down in your strategic playbook, you can offer more details on these change management strategies examples if you like.
Overview of Your Various Change Management Plans
Now that you’ve provided an overview of your change management stages, approach, and strategies, you can present more detail on your change management plans.
It’s helpful if you match each of these types of strategic change plans to your noted objectives or deliverables that you’ve laid out in your playbook presentation. This makes creating this part of your strategic organizational change playbook easier for you to manage and it makes it more comprehensive.
When you detail your change management plans in your strategic playbook, remember that this is a change strategy example, not a full-blown plan. You’re explaining what you plan to do and later, you will develop a more detailed plan that lays out how you will do it.
These strategies for implementing organizational change should be more of an outline and can include preliminary information.
For example, when including details on your communication plan, you can include the channels you plan to use (email, intranet, webinar, etc.) the different groups you’ll be communicating with, and your flow of communications. You can even include a couple of strategic change management examples of communications you might send.
But you won’t need to have your entire communication schedule and every communication being issued mapped out yet. That will come later when you’re developing your full communications plan.
Depending upon the objectives and deliverables required for your project, you may provide strategies for a few, all, or some of these strategic change examples:
- Change Impact Assessment Plan
- Communication Plan
- Leadership/Stakeholder Engagement Plan
- Impacted Users’ (Target Audience) Engagement Plan
- Change Champions/Agents Network Plan
- Training Plan
- Coaching Plan
- Readiness & Change Success Criteria (KPI Tracking Plan)
- Risk/Resistance Mitigation Plan
- Change Normalization Plan
- Transition Plan
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Is there a best OCM strategy that you have used that you would like to share with other project managers and change leads? Please, reach out and let us know.
Next Steps for Your Change Management Playbook
You begin your playbook of organizational change management strategies by answering “What is change management strategy?” You should end with what you will do next with those organizational transformation strategies just presented.
Because you’ve just given a lot of strategy information for the different stages of change management in your OCM playbook, the logical way to close out is to provide an overview of your next steps. These next steps will explain how you’ll be translating that change management strategic playbook into action.
Use the final or one of the final slides in your strategic change management PDF, PPT, or cloud playbook to provide a bullet list of your next immediate steps.
Effective change management strategies need to be translated into change management plans, which they are deployed.
Example slide from OCMS Strategic Playbook explaining next steps to put organizational change management strategies into action.
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Change Management Playbook, Strategies & Samples | Everything You Need
This guide provides you with a step-by-step overview, and everything you need, including templates and samples for developing an end-to-end playbook for presenting your organizational change management strategies.
Are you looking for an easy way to present your deliverables and strategies for all your change management stages? Need to have an online tool that allows you to collaborate with others while outlining your strategies for implementing change?
We’ve designed a simple online cloud tool that you can use as a template. It includes change management strategy example slides full of content that you can easily edit, delete, or add to, according to your change project needs.
Why use the OCM Solution Change Management Strategic Playbook templates and guide?
- All of these OCMS organizational change strategy are absolutely FREE!
- Get graphs, charts, and images that you can edit with your information
- Leverage multiple slides of content to get your change management strategies outlined quickly
- A convenient online interface that you can access from anywhere
- Get several other free tools along with your strategic playbook (change project roadmap, change management workflow, sponsor management toolkit, and many more)
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OCM Solution Free Change Management Strategy Playbook FAQs
What is change management strategy?
A change management strategy is a documentation of the strategy that you will use to design, develop, implement, and track your organizational change approach and key deliverables and activities.
The goal of an organizational change strategy is to facilitate a specific transformation or project that is being undertaken to guide the impacted individuals, teams, and groups through the change successfully.
Different types of change management strategies can be developed to address different types of organizational change.
What should be included in a change management strategy?
The results from your change management assessments to determine the types of strategic change impacts to the organization will be the core used to develop your organizational change strategies and playbook.
Some of the key elements will be an overview of the various strategies for implementing change, including:
1. Communicating with your impacted audience
2. Working with leaders and managers to ensure communications are cascaded down to the rest of their organizations
3. Establishing and managing a change champions network - very critical for increasing the success of the business change
4. Working with key managers and coaching them to more effectively support change management deliverables
5. Tracking and measuring your change management activities
6. Managing resistance
7. Training & reskilling change management stages
8. ....and many more
Remember to download our OCM Strategic Playbook Guide and get a head start on your organisational change strategy.
What is OCM Benefits Realization Plan?
OCM Benefits Realization Plan is a tactical document that concentrates on a specific project or change initiative. Its primary objective is to outline the strategies, metrics, and actions required to ensure that the anticipated benefits associated with that particular initiative are realized.
What are the five steps of change management?
It’s helpful if you use steps or phases to categorize the tasks and deliverables that need to be provided as part of your change management.
The OCM Solution Change Model uses five steps of change management that we refer to as “phases.” Each phase represents a different action that you take in sequence to deliver a successful change management project.
These five steps are:
• Phase 1: Assess
• Phase 2: Develop
• Phase 3: Deploy
• Phase 4: Normalize
• Phase 5: Exit
You can learn more about the 5-phase OCM Solution Change Management Framework here: OCM Solution Change Methodology and Approach (https://www.ocmsolution.com/change-management-approach/)
Note: Content on OCM Solution's ocmsolution.com website is protected by copyright. Should you have any questions or comments regarding this OCM Solutions page, please reach out to Ogbe Airiodion (Change Management Lead) or the OCM Solutions Team today. OCM Solution was previously known as Airiodion Global Services (AGS).
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