The changes our industry is experiencing this year are monumental; which means our reaction to how those changes are managed must be monumental as well! Just one person in your mortgage manufacturing line can cause you big issues; even if you do catch the mistake early. If you have ever heard that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, then you probably need to work on this process.
This checklist is meant to help you streamline the change process to make it easier and efficient. Reigning in this function greatly reduces the “I didn’t Knows” in your organization.
_____ What person or department is change headquarters? This person or department will need to evaluate all changes in the company regarding how the change will occur, where it fits into the mortgage manufacturing process, what positions & systems will be affected by the changes, training and finally roll-out & communication. They will also need to prioritize when changes roll out to mitigate overwhelming the staff. Change should not be randomly assigned as it affects all departments, which is why centralizing this process is so very important!
_____ Who will serve on the change committee as a representative from each department? Make sure you include practitioners in this committee, because their feedback is very important to getting it right. This committee helps identify how a change in one area will affect other areas.
______ What is your communication conduit? Work to achieve one resource center so that employees are not searching all over the place to find information.
_____ What does the process look like (in diagram format) for implementing changes?
_____ How will, or are you, structuring change so that you don’t get caught in the “meeting after meeting” or more precisely “wasted time after wasted time” protocol. Discuss, Decide, Assign Tasks and Go!
_____ How will you monitor the roll-out to ensure the message made it from the top to the front line? This includes employee and customer feedback methodology. Measuring the results of your communication pipeline allows you to quickly assess where messages were missed. This allows you to continually refine the process which increases your communication efficiency.
There is much more to change management but this will get you started. Just imagine how many mistakes you can alleviate when you start to implement a communication process! Your company will never be perfect, but you will be better for the effort involved.
