Organisation Change Management

Business Integration with Organisational Change Management.
Bringing people along for the journey.

Challenge:  In an industry-first, BHP were introducing a new maintenance skill set into the business. While this would diversify and strengthen our workforce, and address an industry-wide skills-gap, these newly-trained maintainers had different qualifications than people were used to, and there were legalities, risks and limitations around what they could and couldn’t do on site. As this project involved challenges to existing norms, infrastructure and people processes, it was burdened with misconceptions, confusion and fear from existing employees.

Solution: Working with a stakeholder audience of 200+ people leaders from GM-level down, across multiple sites Australia-wide, my goal was to support the change by providing understanding, mitigating risk and establishing a level of comfort with the new change. Throughout a 12-month process, this involved:

• site visits for face-to-face interactions
• development of presentations and documentation
• delivering knowledge-transfer sessions
• conducting risk assessments with impacted stakeholders
• data analysis of maintenance strategies
• suggesting alterations to maintenance strategies based on capability assessments
• integration with work management planning process
• providing feedback loops and Q&A forums

Outcome: I enjoyed the challenge of working with different people, understanding their unique gaps and finding ways to close them with the best outcome. These new resources have now been embedded right through the current work management processes from planning and scheduling to execution. Sites have an understanding on how best to utilise their new skill set, and the program continues to grow and evolve, with additional skill sets being introduced to meet client needs. The program is now looked at as a flagship model for other countries and industries.