Change Management process-II

Capacity for Change

Each organization has their own little secret of how things work inside, mostly known as organizational culture. The culture of the organization need to be forward looking first, to be able to accept the change and make team efforts to make things happen on the ground. There are no short cuts to the change process, as there are needs that are minimum for the critical mass to take shape within the organization. The identification of the change agents being the most critical of them. If the organization is unable to create that critical mass, the change process is bound to fail. The other factor being the ability of the organization to cope with the change process. Changes are mostly disruptive to the organization and as such, the organization need to be ready to accept the change and be able to adapt their manual and automatic procedures to be tweaked to run the changed processes smoothly with minimum disruption to the Changes. The third factor is the application of technology to cope with the Change process. Most of the organizations would need to modernize their technology infrastructure to be able to expedite the change process and also act as a catalyst to the Change process. Actionable First Steps What are also critical are the actionable first steps that would produce tangible results showing tangible outcomes in terms of the revenue impact, the processing times, better productivity and other indicators defined earlier. These would be the ice breakers so to say. Things that would startle the eyes of the observers and ensure their buy-in of the total project. The purpose for these First steps is to get the resistors of the Change process to neutralize if not swayed to the support.

Supporting Structures and Processes

At the early stages of the project, the team needs to define the needs of the support structure and the processes that would support the change process. There has to be a single leader within the organization to lead the effort and make necessary coordination and communication among various departments. The person should be from chosen from one of the Managers most affected by the Change and should have good working relationships with all the departments within the Organization and should have the leadership qualities to drive the Change. In addition to the inside Change Manager, there should be an outsider looking over the shoulder of the Change Manager and share the experiences of the outside world and make due comparisons with the best practices available in the same industry. These are the two very critical roles to be played very carefully. The Change Management process should be overseen by a Steering Committee made out of the senior management of the organization, who would have intimate knowledge of the operations, the information management, human resources, and the critical processes involved in the Change process including Finance. The Steering Committee would need to sit once a month to discuss the critical issues being reported by the project management and resolve them and set directions for the future and tackle any political issues standing on the way. The process would start with a general workshop to build the awareness of the staff about the Change Management process and the impact of them at the organizational and the departmental levels. The team will need to build a an awareness program of their own to keep the staff informed of the developments, through newsletters, communicative emails and other medium of communications. Finally, there should be adequate management support from the top to ensure smooth executions of the activities and make them happen on the ground. Only then the change can be everlasting. Also be sure about resistance against change. This write-up is from Mr. Rial Ahsan is the CEO & President of DMS, e-mail