What is Change Management

Written by: Austin Watene

Why do organisations need Change Management?

Organisations are changing at an unprecedented rate, and the pace of change continues to accelerate. Businesses must regularly manage multiple transitions to new technology, processes, and procedures. They must constantly update their business plan, overall strategy, and objectives in reaction to external market forces and disruptors that continue to revolutionise whole market sectors. Change priorities are continually addressed and redistributed when firms reorganise their labour force to match new objectives. 

Developing a consistent approach to implementing change can help organisations manage various transitions requirements, trying to keep processes as seamless as possible while managing how staff deal with the diversity of change.

Change management defined

Individual Change Management: Change Management is the act of monitoring and assisting change at every level, wherever it happens. It includes defined procedures and tools to guide the people side of change to improve a planned business or technology initiative. Change Management assists the people affected to make the personal transitions necessary to engage with, accept, and deliver the new way of doing things.

Organisational Change Management: For organisations, Change Management is successfully implementing methods and tactics to assist employees in accepting and adapting to organisational changes in the workplace. Management teams establish how change is managed and determine how to implement it most effectively. Change Management and change communication teams are essential performance drivers for many firms.

Change management programmes

Project Management and Change Management assist in transitioning an organisation from its present state, how things are done now, through a period of adjustment, to the planned future state. Change programmes linked to the organisational drivers - strategy, initiatives, and policies are prioritised and implemented. They effectively plan, execute, and deliver the programme initiatives or technological solutions to realise the desired changes and advantages and empower the people affected by the change. Change Management requires planning before the change occurs, not a reaction to change.

Change management benefits

Transformations have significantly improved success rates with systematically managed Change Management methodology and processes. Programmes fail to realise their benefits when Change Management only responds to the transformation or when no change outcomes are initiated.

Well-managed and planned change programmes bring about positive improvements in infrastructure, procedures, culture, technology, and internal, external, and other service changes. Effective Change Management can deliver the following improvements:

• Drives benefit realisation and outcome accomplishment - Data and experience suggest that effective Change Management creates higher benefit realisation and result and outcome attainment.

• Manages the quantity of change - the volume and frequency of change that occurs in businesses today can have a drastic impact on people, their welfare, and performance, with a resulting impact on work performance. Change Management will identify impact risks and help manage the effects on people and work.

• Reduce the costs of transformations - many businesses have examples, or even a heritage, of improperly managed changes that did not provide the desired results and caused stress and uncertainty inside the company. Under-delivering on change is no longer acceptable.

• Align organisational practice with organisational values - This scenario is especially pertinent for businesses that appreciate and uphold the importance of their employees.

• Building the necessary internal skills - Employees are expected to possess fundamental organisational and personal competencies in Change Management.

X4MIS principles for effective change

The Compose function specifies the scope of the change, with the idea that the impact on the organisation, customers, and people will determine how much change is necessary. Any change's full effect will be verified at the Compose step.

Manage the compose function, and this one begins simultaneously. The strategy is developed once each action is completed. Managing change entails controlling the dialogue between the change agents and the individuals tasked with putting the new plans into practice, controlling the organisational environment in which change may take place, and controlling the emotional bonds that are crucial to any transformation.

Embed the change is to integrate it into the organisation's culture so that it becomes "the way things are done". It is proving the relationship between new success and new changes and ensuring that the entire organisation, from the top down, adopts the changes.

Enable considers the collaborative effort required to handle change effectively and efficiently. It addresses the probability that sponsors and managers need more skills or aptitude to understand the effort required. The goal is to acquire new competencies quickly, using a balanced strategy combining internal competency development with gaining knowledge from other sources.

The X4MIS Change Management Methodology

 The X4MIS Change Management Methodology is a framework for planning, delivering, and troubleshooting change programmes. Each function's articles represent concepts & procedures that may be used in any change circumstance. Articles need to reflect certain legislation or timeline-specific sequence.

The methodology is not a 100-page guide from beginning to end; instead, it is a selection of tasks and procedures (a buffet) from which you can choose depending on your needs. This Knowledge Base will continue to expand and evolve as more contributors join X4MIS and add their ideas. These contributions will include recent innovations and thought leadership in the field of change. Resulting in an increase in the number of change processes, procedures, and artifacts that will better serve the needs of your organization's change initiatives.