What is persona mapping in change management? We can use Persona mapping to help understand the needs and wants of a target audience or market. Persona maps can ensure we meet the needs of our stakeholders.
What is persona mapping in change management?
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.
For any given product or service there will be many named profiles or personas.
Why create personas for change management?
By creating personas and mapping them, can help us to communicate with different people or stakeholders. We can adapt our communications to meet their needs, their map of the world.
The basics of creating a persona for change interventions
Who might you be targeting? Basic demographics: age, education, gender, etc. A person is a piece of fiction. A stereotype if you like. Base your persona characters on research NOT guess work.
Simon Spyer says that effective personas have five sections:
Who are they?
Bring each persona to life. A persona is a stereotype. The more realistic they seem, the easier it is for us to relate to them. What is their name? What do they look like? Have a photo. Add some quotes of what they might say or opinions they may hold.
Profile
Think about your persona’s demographics. It can also be useful to think about things such as workload, financial situation, confidence etc.
Goals
What is your persona aiming to achieve? Why do they want to do this and by when?
Motivation
What drives the person? What influences them? Where is the pressure for change – internal or external?
Behaviours. Where does the persona go for knowledge or information? What is the personality of your persona? introvert, extrovert? Big picture or detail focused?
Testing your personas
A US-based CRM expert, Alex Cowan has created what he calls the ‘REACT’ method. It is a useful way of checking that the characters you have created have enough depth.
Real, Exact, Actionable, Clear and Testable.
Real – does the persona reflect the people/ stakeholders we have?
Exact – it’s not about Female 20-30 – say a 27yr old female
Actionable – is there enough information to plan what to communicate with this personality?
Clear – If read by others would they understand the character? Could they describe how the person may act based on the information given?
Testable – Shoe the profiles to real stakeholders. ask if they represent them. Check communications. Are more people now engaging?
How many personas do we need?
That will depend on your application. one will not be enough. 10 might be too many. The more you have, the more balanced your communication strategy will be.
Using personas to profile stakeholders
Using persona mapping in change management, we can enhance our change processes and communications by adding change related elements to each profile. Factors we should consider adding to each persona include:
- 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
etc…
Empathy Mapping and Persona Mapping in Change Management
Persona mapping in change management can be enhanced by adding empathy to our personas. Adding personality can help bring a fictional character to life. To make it seem more real.
Add to each profile:
- 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?
The more of the personality we can add to a persona, the more empathy we can build and more effective our change communications. We need to meet our stakeholder groups where they are, not drag them kicking and screaming to us.
Power and influence mapping
Once we have our personas we can plot them on a range of maps to help us.
One such map is a matrix of influence against change interest:
Persona mapping in change management
Mapping against RACI-X
RACI or RACI-X is another way to map personas or stakeholders.
R – Responsible for leading engagement
A – Approves communications
C – Consulted on essential interactions
I – Keep Informed
X – Where the team role exclusively manages the relationship and all interactions
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.
Summary of persona mapping in change management
Once Personas have been developed they are powerful pieces of data. We can use them with a wide range of other tools to ensure effective communications strategies.
Investment in the development of robust personas early on in a project can make or break a successful implementation.
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