Nurturing Change Through Community
By Tess Ellender, Process Improvement Intern
May 8, 2019
Building a Community of Change Management Practitioners
The Colorado Department of Transportation’s (CDOT) Office of Process Improvement (OPI) is always looking for ways to continuously improve. Sometimes this appears in the form of eliminating paper documentation or creating checklists, but other times it develops into something much larger. The Public Sector Change Practitioners (PSCP) is a Community of Practice (CoP) that has grown into a worldwide opportunity for change management practitioners to share their successes, failures, and lessons learned. Michelle Malloy, Senior Program Manager of Strategy & Change Management Services at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT),worked with former interns Meagan Brown, Learning and Development Specialist, City of Louisville, and Clair Anderson, Staff Development Center Supervisor at the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing (HCPF), to establish the group in May 2018 and it has not stopped growing since.
The team worked to help develop what PSCP would look like and what its deliverables would be. Over a short time, the vision of PSCP morphed into a long-term plan, a quarterly strategy, and was then fully transitioned into the hands of CDOT.
“ I was confident we could deliver bimonthly webinars consistently based on our experience producing other webinars.” - Meagan Brown
From here, the team was able to decide on a clear direction for how PSCP would deliver information. Since May 2018, PSCP has delivered bimonthy webinars on a variety of change management topics, such as training approaches, best practice tools, individual case studies, and panel discussions. Each presentation aims to cover lessons learned and success stories to inspire and coach others on their change management journeys while also providing a platform for change experts to share wisdom and experiences with like-minded professionals.
PSCP Successes, and Where the CoP is Today
It has been nine months since PSCP’s first webinar, and Clair and Meagan are both still so passionate about what they’ve created. In addition to Michelle, both Clair and Meagan are currently PSCP board members, and are sometimes presenters in these webinars.
Having the opportunity to present at the January 2019 webinar herself, Meagan reflected on the unique opportunity to give back to the community that she has learned so much from.
“I have learned so many valuable lessons from our community, and am very appreciative that I was able to give my own presentation for others to learn from too.” - Meagan Brown
PSCP has grown from a small idea into a worldwide community reaching members in countries as far as Uganda. Although they do not have concrete data supporting webinar influence on change management success and improvement, Clair and Meagan both hear how inspiring the webinars are by word of mouth.
“They self-report that hearing real-life examples from the community builds unspoken connections with peers in the change management field, and provides – sometimes unexpected, but – useful information and solutions they can apply to the challenges they are facing.” - Clair Anderson
In the spirit of continuous improvement, PSCP has recently rolled out a new website. On the website, there is an event calendar showing scheduled webinars on it, as well as the presentation recordings and slide decks from previous webinars. Their goal with this new website was to get the information out to as many people as possible, even if they couldn’t attend the webinar live.
On the PSCP website, people who are interested can also sign up for the distribution list, so they can get more information on webinars and give feedback on what they’d like to see in this community of practice.
In addition to the new website, PSCP now has a Youtube channel. This serves as another great resource for those who want access to change management information, even if they are not part of the CoP.
How Can You Be a Part of the PSCP CoP?
Do you want to be involved? Want to join? Want to present? Shoot an email to info@pcspractitioners.org to get in touch with one of the board members and become a part of our community! This community of practice provides a semi-structured opportunity to learn, question, share, reproduce and evolve successful practices from change practitioners around the world, and we hope you’ll join us in this journey!
