Change Management - What is it and why it matters?

Complexity of Change

 According to Wiki, ‘Change management is a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organisations from a current state to a desired future state.

It is an organisational process aimed at helping employees to accept and embrace changes in their current business environment.’

Such definition of Change Management is often called Organisation Change Management to differentiate from the software change management that refers to software configuration management or project change control that refers to managing the project scope, timeline, and budget.

When we talk about the Organisation Change Management we need to understand who needs to change and who are all the stakeholders that will be affected.

Any change in the organisation involves to various degrees following stakeholders:

• Customers – they experience change in customer service at all touch points, unless change is completely internal (hard to imagine such changes these days!)
• Executive team – they need to formulate the strategy and embrace the change first so they can ‘walk the talk’ and inspire the organisation to internalise the change
• Line management (within an organisation and within partner organisations) – they need to interpret the strategy, define the ‘how to’ plan, and then embrace the change so that they can become effective mentors and coaches and continue to inspire ‘by example’
• Line workers (within an organisation and within partner organisations) – they make the change happen or not; when they are inspired and identify with the change the organisation achieves true transformation

Given the wide reach of change on all levels of stakeholders internally and externally to the organisation, the program that has to be put in place needs to define correctly the scope of the change being introduced and the areas being impacted.

Read more of this article: Business Process Management (BPM) - Change Management - What is it and why it matters?