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Capabilities | Change Management
The term 'change management' is used in different ways in the business community. I am using it here to mean everything that goes into designing, planning and leading important business changes. The objective of the change can be all-encompassing, affecting all the people and activities in an organisation, or focussed on a particular area, such as establishing a new role or a new individual in a role.
Change management usually includes:
- Understanding the true nature and objectives of the change, and the environment in which it will take place
- Getting the support of the important stakeholders, and ensuring that they act in ways that support the change throughout its progress
- Selecting the people who will lead the change, and making sure they have the necessary skills, information, facilities, and support for the duration of the change
- Understanding the dependencies between the different elements of the change, working out the best way to break it into stages, and planning each stage
- Understanding the perceptions of the people the change will affect, and winning their support through appropriate communication and involvement
For a given change some of these factors could be crucial, and ignoring them would lead to catastrophic results. For another change it would be safe to leave some aspects to take care of themselves, and spending time and effort on them would be a waste. Change management is about deciding how to get the best return on effort.
The impact of poor change management can be serious - more than 80% of major business changes of all types fail to achieve their objectives or timescales. Not only were the time and effort put into them lost, but there was usually a significant impact on morale and productivity. The flipside of this grim statistic is that organisations who manage change successfully have gained tremendous market advantage.
Most of my work has involved major change and people, but the two case studies that best illustrate change management are 'Redesign of a manufacturing division' and 'Resolving conflicting objectives in an IS group'.
