Change Manager - Pinelands at Old Mutual South Africa

Role overview

• This role will assess, develop and implement change management strategies and plans on key strategic initiatives across Personal Finance by anticipating and minimizing associate resistance and business disruption, maximising associate engagement, drive faster adoption, and higher proficiency on the changes impacting employees in the organisation.
• The successful candidate will be responsible for focusing on the people aspects of change, providing business centric solutions, including organisation assessment and required design solutioning, stakeholder analysis and engagement, change impact assessment, change communications, the coordination of change audience learning and up-skilling, and all other change management related activities, including tracking and reporting of, to enhance business outcomes and accelerate the adoption of strategic business initiatives in an integrated coherent manner.

Board / Committee Memberships

• Participates in various project committees and the Old Mutual Personal Finance Change Forum, and as such contributes to the wider PF Change Management strategy and implementation plans in the segment.

Key Result Areas:

The Change Manager will apply a structured change management approach and methodology to develop and implement change strategies for strategic change projects as follows:

• Develop a change management strategy based on understanding of the strategic change initiative, and the groups (stakeholders) and change risk.
• Clearly describe the change, identifies stakeholders and assesses the impact on the various target audiences.
• Proactively identify potential people risks and anticipate points of resistance; then develops specific plans to mitigate or address the concerns.
• Develop a pragmatic, actionable and targeted organisational alignment plan for sponsor and stakeholder engagement which includes communication, coaching, education and training, and resistance management.
• Ensure user role mapping for technology change implementations to enable appropriate user access and rights.
• Comprehending detailed technical updates and translating them into consumable insights for non-technical teams.
• Work with project teams to integrate change management activities into the overall project plans.
• Drive the creation of change champions and agents in the impact/affected areas and leverage existing platforms and forums to enable change management and ease of adoption.
• Create and enable reinforcement mechanisms and celebrations of success.

Effective collaboration, business partnering and stakeholder management

• Work with communication, training, and HC specialists in the formulation of particular plans and activities to support project implementation.
• Develop and roll-out communications in partnership with Internal Communications to ensure alignment of all communications and messaging across the organisation.
• Collaborate with project and business teams to ensure the successful execution of the end-to-end user adoption management strategy.
• Provide active and visible coaching to leaders who are change sponsors.

Measuring and reporting on user adoption and broader change impact

• Define and measure success metrics to track adoption, utilisation and proficiency of individual changes and ensure that business change benefits are realised.
• Pro-actively identify risks, resistance, performance gaps and/or issues relating to user adoption and develop and implement mitigating and corrective actions on an iterative basis.
• Ongoing monitoring and reporting of change implementation to the various stakeholder groups

Actively build and contribute to knowledge assets, templates, tools and resources to support building greater awareness & understanding of change tools & principles in partnership with the Change Lead and Organisational Effectiveness COE.

Minimum Qualification :

• Relevant degree at honours level
• Prosci change management certification or designation (or equivalent change certifications)

Preferred Qualification:

• Project Management qualification advantageous

Experience required

• At least 10 years of experience applying change management principles, methodologies, and tools for implementing business change
• At least 5 years experience in a financial industry experience
• Experience in large scale culture transformation and technical programme implementation in the financial services industry

Skills and attributes:

• Solid understanding of project management methodology
• Facilitation, influencing and coaching skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Highly organized, energetic, execution-orientated and creative change professional
• Ability to handle ambiguity and respond to a rapidly changing environment
• Ability to translate and simplify complex change into easily consumable components for impacted users and stakeholders.