Member Profile – Corina St-Jacques
Tell us about yourself.
I moved to Vancouver last autumn with my family. We have been living in Bali, Dubai, and Brussels for the last 15 years. I am originally from the US and my husband is Canadian. My background is in IT project management and law.
How did you get into Change Management?
I officially found Change Management about five years ago and promptly joined the ACMP MENA chapter. I had been working in IT project management, doing change management on the fly. Learning about ADKAR was such a relief! It was such a great feeling to realize that clever people had been developing tools to manage change. Up until that point, I was having to develop all my own bespoke change management tools, so I was really excited to start borrowing Prosci’s.
Why did you decide to join ACMP Vancouver?
Introducing myself to the ACMP Vancouver chapter was one of my first steps when I arrived last fall. While in the ACMP MENA chapter, I volunteered for the international conference speaker committee and helped write the ACMP standard. I love that I never need to explain what I do for a living when I am at an ACMP meeting.
What are you working on?
I just finished speaking at the 2018 ACMP conference in Las Vegas where I gave a tool-talk about two customer experience (CX) tools that I have found are really helpful to use during the initiation phase of a change project.
Do you have any recommended change management books / resources to share?
I came across this quote this week and it really resonated with me: “Project management gets stuff done, change management gets things adopted. A shiny new system is useless if people don’t use it.” (Tammy Tansley) Carsten Tams is an up-and-coming thought leader in change management. He used a great quote recently by Mary Parker Follett (1929) who is the mother of modern management: “Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.” (Carsten Tams) Prosci’s Tim Creasey on the ROI of Change Management was a turning point for me: “The most important and most strategic changes in organizations tend to have a greater dependency on the people side of change. Change management is a discipline aimed at enabling and encouraging those individual changes.” (Tim Creasey)
How do you like to spend your time outside of work?
Hiking, yoga, and cooking. Plus, I spend a lot of time taking photos of my menfolk’s rugby matches.