Accelerer
Fuelling the Change with Accelerated Outcomes

The value of change management planning is often underestimated, causing initiatives to be rockier and more expensive in terms of both time and resources. To remain viable and scale during organisational change it is essential to drive innovation that fuels growth and boosts shareholder returns.

Organisational change refers to business technology and infrastructure change, process change and culture transformation. Failing to manage the people side of change ultimately lowers employee morale and often leads to internal resistance. To avoid such complications, organisations need the right partner who can help them identify, design and implement the right change frameworks.

Enter Accelerer.

Founded in 2007, Accelerer is driven by the mission of working with clients to establish the right change framework that is practical and pragmatic for their business. Accelerer’s crossskilled professionals hold extensive experience in transformation, leadership development, agile application, program and project management. They seek to deeply understand the clients’ unique challenges to deliver the right solution. In an interview with Manage HR, Raechelle McLean, Program and Change Lead, and Managing Director; Leanne Hutton, Program and Change Lead; Jonathan Leeson, Change Practitioner, share their insights into how they accelerate business outcomes.

How do you address change management needs for clients?

We frequently come across three keywords— fluid, ambiguous, and competitive. Clients often ask us how to plan for specific activities in fluid environments where the picture is still a bit hazy, and their competitors appear to be sprinting to the finish.

We break down the hazy picture into bite-sized pieces, explore all resolution pathways, make clear recommendations for our client to decide on, and deliver practical outcomes without breaking their business and, more importantly, their people. As change practitioners, we have always worn many hats. However, the current environment provides an opportunity to review the traditional role of a change practitioner, and identify ways to diversify our skill set to better support our clients to achieve end-to-end outcomes and realise benefits.

Could you elaborate on the approach you take to serve your clients?

Previously, the measure and metrics of project implementation focused on time and money. Today, the shift is more about people, engagement and adoption, including measures and metrics. Focusing on human-centered design elements with the internal and external users at the forefront, enables ‘the-art-of-possible’ thinking that is aligned to clients’ objectives. Instead of delivering out-of-the-box solutions, we create pragmatic solutions for each client specific to their change journey.

Often clients pull one lever at a time, which of course has a cross stream impact, for instance they focus on implementing new processes, but don’t look at how this might shift the dial in their culture and behaviour. This in turn results in them struggling to realise the full potential and benefits of the original intention of the change.

Our team embeds themselves in the ways of working with our clients to find the motivation of a particular group, and then accordingly drive the change in mindset. We combine various techniques to implement the right fit for a particular client.

The unpredictability over the last 18 months has highlighted the need for hybrid approaches, including blended approaches for change, projects, communications, engagement learning and delivery. Coupled with the ability to deliver across a myriad of ecosystems often including different states, regions and countries. Our experience ensures we are able to deliver outcomes across such varied environments and cultures.

We believe in building trusted, open and honest relationships where two-way feedback is imperative to deliver the right types of change interventions. We continually track the progress on what has landed or what has skewed, furthermore we include follow up post implementation review of the change at various intervals sometimes at 6, 12 and 18 months. This interval check helps to realign on the initial intent, looks at how the client have continuously improved and innovated, to identify where strategic activities have remained on track as they navigate what has come to light since the initial delivery. In a world where delivery is fluid, responses are needed NOW, and projects have less time to map out the HOW, Accelerer can help to work with you on the WHY and put the foot on the accelerator to achieve outcomes.

Could you share a customer success story with us?

Toward the end of 2017, BoM approached us seeking assistance to create, and embed, change capabilities via an enterprise transformation framework. Following the design, the client understood it was necessary to implement a change/transformation framework that aligned to their project delivery model, to maximise adoption and ensure project benefits were realised within the business.

Our role was to design or select a methodology, create an easy-to-use repeatable framework, while additionally drive the outcomes by setting up their change practice. A practical implementation was imperative as the business had limited experience with formalised corporate change. We also assisted in rolling out their organisational design elements with leadership coaching and cultural interventions.

Throughout the process, we worked through implementing practical solutions within an overarching strategy. With early engagement, we selected influential individuals within the organisation and assisted with understanding change management within their business units, which enabled us to deliver with speed. This pre-work helped us implement the strategy by ensuring that the relative stakeholder groups had comprehensive knowledge about the change, and what it means for them.

Using the Prosci change model afforded us access to the data, and evidence, to support a fit for purpose implementation. We adapted and modified our way of interacting according to their business, ensuring we hit the right spot. The key here was that client leadership brought Accelerer in early enough to begin the strategic change work, understood that we would bring a realistic approach and allowed time for engagement, and ultimately adoption.

What does the future hold for Accelerer?

We aim to serve as a hybrid model for management consulting space, where our leads are experienced in designing and delivering program management, change management, and leadership coaching, not just one-siloed view or experience level that requires extended resource modelling. We are constantly thinking laterally to balance the broad needs of the implementation at hand.

Our plan is to further expand our footprint into the Asia Pacific market, working with key stakeholders within that region. The recent global pandemic has made us all realise that we can deliver positive results remotely and effectively. We certainly want to showcase our capabilities of delivering practical outcomes in a remote environment to clients.

Although we are based in Melbourne, we have been working with clients over Australia, APAC and the US for many years. We view change as an ever-evolving field where we can assist businesses to be educated, understand what it means for them at a point in time, and plan for the unknowns. What really matters is their people—the engine of a business—are consistently supported and engaged throughout the change by implementing layers of interventions at various points along the user transition Raechelle McLean journey.