A Persona map is a fictional character. At the same time, it needs to be a realistic profile of our target customer. They reflect characteristics like job or role title, personal attributes, goals, motivations, attitudes etc.
Why create personas for change management?
The basics of creating a persona for change interventions
Who are they?
Profile
Goals
Motivation
Testing your personas
How many personas do we need?
Using personas to profile stakeholders
- The impact of the change on them – Low – Medium – High
- Position towards the proposed change – Anti – Neutral – Allow – Help – Lead
- Ability to change – Unaware – Aware – Informed – Equipped – Practised – Exemplary
- Change Readiness – Low – Medium – High
- Percieved Resistance – Low – Medium – High
Empathy Mapping and Persona Mapping in Change Management
- What they think and feel when they hear about the change
- What they see – what is their reality about this?
- Say and Do – what are they saying about the change to people they meet. Do they talk about pain or gain more often?
- What are they hearing about the change? what messages are they getting from others? Conflicts of priorities?
Power and influence mapping
Mapping against RACI-X
Frequent us of persona mapping in change management programmes
Having your personas to plan with is one thing. Using them as valuable collateral is another. Here we can learn a lot from the retail world. In retail, they have persons called ‘Buyer personas‘. We would know these as customers. Not only is the persona data used to design a communication, but often used throughout the whole customer journey. In retail, this is from seeing the product in an advert, through to entering the store, selecting the product and completing the transaction. The persona data is used to test and align every stage. In change management, we can use personas in much the same way. Not just at planning, but to test every communication.
Persona mapping in change management for stakeholder segmentation
Once we have personas, we can check that we have personas for each stakeholder group. Again we can use the personas to ensure that the right data and information is going to the right target audience.
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