Impact and Readiness Assessment

The starting point for assessing impact and readiness is that the stakeholder identification and initial impact and assessment have already been completed. The task at this stage is to take the initial analysis down to the next level of detail both in terms of the stakeholder groups themselves, the understanding of the impact on those groups and the levels of resistance-commitment. For example, during initial stakeholder analysis all employees may have been treated as a homogeneous group. This would now be too broad for the differing impacts that they may experience. Therefore, the employee stakeholder group may, in this case, be subdivided into office-based employees and shop floor—based employees in order to take account of the differing impacts of HR self-service technology in their respective areas. The key here is to balance the degree to which stakeholder groups are subdivided. As a rule of thumb, the level of department on a particular site is usually the lowest level of subdivision necessary.

Then for each of the detailed stakeholder groups, the impacts are recorded for each relevant process in terms of change from the 'as is' way of working to the 'to be' way. Clearly, not every process impacts every stakeholder group and the degree of impact differs in each case. From this, a picture of relative impact emerges. Those groups with the greatest impact are often those where most attention must be paid in the change planning that follows.

At this stage, it is also useful to assess the readiness to change for each detailed stakeholder group. This readiness assessment concentrates on the attitude that the detailed stakeholder groups have towards the new processes and systems. There are a number of factors listed here:

1. History of change within the organisation: Has change been managed effectively previously?
2. What is the capacity for change in the organisation? Have major change initiatives been recently completed or are under way?
3. What is the level of awareness of the detailed stakeholder group as to the nature of the change for them?
4. And finally, 'what's in it for me?' On balance, will the detailed stakeholder group view this as a positive or negative change, bearing in mind the nature of the impact on them?

There are a number of approaches to undertaking a readiness assessment, and they are summarised in Figure 1.

Tool	What is it?	How & when to use it?
Questionnaires	A set of questions usually in a tick box format They can be done as paper exercises, by e-mail or via the intranet	They can be sent out to a variety of stakeholders They can be used to gather a lot of information quickly from a large number of people They are often used as the first vehicle to identify areas that need to be probed in more detail
Focus Groups	A workshop with a group of people (5–15) to elicit more detail about why particular issues have been raised	They are usually run either as natural work groups, or as representatives from various stakeholder groups Format and content are changed to suit group characteristics and issue(s) to be discussed They allow the 'why' to be explored in more depth
One-to-One Interviews	A structured interview where individuals are asked a number of questions and answers are recorded and analysed	These are either used to elicit information around sensitive areas or to ascertain how aligned a particular group is around each stage of the project They are often used with leadership and managerial groups

Figure 1: Approaches to readiness assessment.

When using questionnaires or working with focus groups or conducting one-to-one interviews, examples of questions to assess change readiness can include the following:

	Disagree			Agree
Are you aware of which self-service tools will be rolled out to your business unit and which ones you will need to use?	1	2	3	4	5
Do you understand how the self-service tools will work?	1	2	3	4	5
Do you understand your role and responsibilities for using the tools as a manager?	1	2	3	4	5