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| WHAT IS CHANGE MANAGEMENT? |
Change management is the discipline that guides how we prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change in order to drive organizational success and outcomes. While all changes are unique and all individuals are unique, decades of research shows there are actions we can take to influence people in their individual transitions. Change management provides a structured approach for supporting the individuals in your organization to move from their own current states to their own future states.
THREE LEVELS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Individual Change Management
While it is the natural psychological and physiological reaction of humans to resist change, we are actually quite resilient creatures. When supported through times of change, we can be wonderfully adaptive and successful. Individual change management requires understanding how people experience change and what they need to change successfully.
It also requires knowing what will help people make a successful transition: what messages do people need to hear when and from whom, when the optimal time to teach someone a new skill is, how to coach people to demonstrate new behaviors, and what makes changes “stick” in someone’s work. Individual change management draws on disciplines like psychology and neuroscience to apply actionable frameworks to individual change.
Organizational/Initiative Change Management
While change happens at the individual level, it is often impossible for a project team to manage change on a person-by-person basis. Organizational or initiative change management provides us with the steps and actions to take at the project level to support the hundreds or thousands of individuals who are impacted by a project. Organizational change management involves first identifying the groups and people who will need to change as the result of the project, and in what ways they will need to change. Organizational change management then involves creating a customized plan for ensuring impacted employees receive the awareness, leadership, coaching, and training they need in order to change successfully.
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Driving successful individual transitions should be the central focus of the activities in organizational change management. Organizational change management is complementary to your project management. Project management ensures your project’s solution is designed, developed and delivered, while change management ensures your project’s solution is effectively embraced, adopted and used.
Enterprise Change Management Capability
Enterprise change management is an organizational core competency that provides competitive differentiation and the ability to effectively adapt to the ever-changing world. An enterprise change management capability means effective change management is embedded into your organization’s roles, structures, processes, projects and leadership competencies. Change management processes are consistently and effectively applied to initiatives, leaders have the skills to guide their teams through change, and employees know what to ask for in order to be successful.
The end result of an enterprise change management capability is that individuals embrace change more quickly and effectively, and organizations are able to respond quickly to market changes, embrace strategic initiatives, and adopt new technology more quickly and with less productivity impact. This capability does not happen by chance, however, and requires a strategic approach to embed change management across an organization.
The importance of a Change !
Change is happening in your organization. Every day, new initiatives and projects are launched to improve performance, increase profits, and enhance your competitive advantage. You could be implementing technology to enable a more mobile workforce, reengineering a process to ensure regulatory compliance or pursuing an enterprise-wide transformation around customer experience. There is a common denominator for achieving the intended outcomes of your initiative: people.
Your initiatives impact how individual people do their work: their processes, job roles, workflows, reporting structures, behaviors and even their identity within the organization. Change management is the approach to driving adoption and usage so initiatives deliver expected results and outcomes. Here is why you need change management:
CLOSE THE GAP BETWEEN REQUIREMENTS AND RESULTS
All too often, organizational changes meet requirements without delivering expected results. They deliver the necessary outputs without delivering on expected outcomes. The focus of the change effort is on the solution rather than the benefits of the solution. The gap that exists between requirements and results, between outputs and outcomes, between solutions and benefits is the people who bring the change to life in their day-to-day work. Change management enables the closing of this gap by effectively supporting and equipping those people impacted by a change to be successful in bringing it to life in how they work.
INCREASE LIKELIHOOD OF PROJECT SUCCESS
The data is abundantly clear. The better we apply change management, the more likely we are to deliver on project objectives. A correlation data from over 2,000 data points and eight years shows that initiatives with excellent change management are six times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. By simply moving from “poor” to “fair,” change management increases the likelihood of meeting objectives by three fold. McKinsey data also shows that the ROI captured from excellent change management is significantly more than with poor change management. Change management, when applied effectively on a project, significantly increases the success rate of the effort.
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TAKE THE CHANCE OUT OF CHANGE
Change is difficult. To the degree that we can, we want to remove the chance or variability associated with change. Project management has accomplished this by providing direction on sequencing milestones, deliverables, activities and resources over the lifecycle of an effort. Unless we proactively support and guide people through the changes our projects bring, we leave them embracing change to chance. Change management removes the chance from change by providing employees with the preparation, support and skills they need to succeed in change.
The Author: Ala'a Elbeheri
About:
A versatile and highly accomplished senior certified IT risk management Advisor and Senior IT Lead Auditor with over 20 years of progressive experience in all domains of ICT.
• Program and portfolio management, complex project management, and service delivery, and client relationship management.
• Capable of providing invaluable information while making key strategic decisions and spearheading customer-centric projects in IT/ICT in diverse sectors.
• Displays strong business and commercial acumen and delivers cost-effective solutions contributing to financial and operational business growth in international working environments.
• Fluent in oral and written English, German, and Arabic with an Professional knowledge of French.
• Energetic and dynamic relishes challenges and demonstrates in-depth analytical and strategic ability to facilitate operational and procedural planning.
• Fully conversant with industry standards, with a consistent track record in delivering cost-effective strategic solutions.
• Strong people skills, with proven ability to build successful, cohesive teams and interact well with individuals across all levels of the business. Committed to promoting the ongoing development of IT skills throughout an organization
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