Once an organization decides to complete an assessment and design, it’s important to understand the process involved.

If your organization is still in the process of making that decision, please see Transform Your Finance Function with Assessment and Design for more details.

Each organization is unique, so no assessment is the same—which means there’s no cookie-cutter checklist to follow.

However, there are some general rules of the road that can guide the assessment in a direction that will help yield successful results.

Creating the Right Environment

Creating the right environment is key to successful change management within an organization. Internally, this can include the following steps:

• Create an environment where team members feel valued and trusted, so they share insights into current processes and potential ideas for improvement.
• Over communicate about why this approach is being taken.
• Help employees understand the process isn’t intended to be a criticism, but rather an opportunity to discover room for improvement and increased efficiency which could boost job morale overall.

Providing Clear Rules of Engagement

From the beginning, the objective party’s assessment approach should establish clear rules of engagement including the following:

• Open and honest discussion
• No retaliation against team members who speak their mind
• Acceptance of new ideas and identification of inefficiencies at a team-member level
• Appreciation and validation of team members

When the right environment is created and the team trusts the process, the results will be more candid, forthright, and thorough. The team has a chance to feel heard and validated, especially if they see the results of these conversations executed within the organization.

Gathering Details

As an organization engages with the objective party performing the assessment, there’s an art to the process.

Here are some general guidelines that help enable the objective party to successfully draw details from your organization:

• Offer policies and procedures up front to allow for an informed discussion to reduce frustration and redundancy.
• Establish rapport and commonalties with the team members to put them at ease.
• Ask open ended questions without judgment.
• Be flexible and nimble to allow the conversation to guide the discussion.
• Provide the history behind the processes which could yield great insights into overcoming hurdles during change management.

Throughout the assessment process, it’s imperative the organization tests the pulse of the team to identify feedback opportunities. The organization can then provide that feedback to the objective party to enable the process to adapt and adjust as needed.

We’re Here to Help

The assessment process can be intimidating to an organization, but setting the tone at the top, creating the right environment, and taking the right approach to gathering information can create a process that seeks to both improve and reinforce the elements an organization does well.

For more information about completing a successful assessment and design, contact your Moss Adams professional.