"Change is the only constant" Herclitus, Greek philosopher
For this blogpost I refer to Change Management as the Methodology that is used to execute organizational change (vs. personal change). There are many more definitions for Change Management (e.g. check these Whatis.com or the Oxford Dictionary etc.) on the internet so go ahead and check it out. In any case a well thought through Change Management approach is key to any successful organizational change effort! What do you do in your programs/projects to deal with change? Do you have a dedicated team or team member to think about change management? How do you ensure support for the changes that you and your team are implementing?
Based on my experience it seems that many organizational change efforts are not living up to their potential because the Change Management efforts are not really fully thought through, supported and implemented. Let's look at an example: A tech company wants to change their CRM System from salesforce.com to SAP CRM. The change has been discussed between executive Managers and some other senior leaders. This specific change effort will have a big impact on the Sales Team (and other teams like Sales Operations etc.). In order to make a change like this successful we need to spend considerable time and effort to come up with a clear plan on how we plan to make this change management effort successful. We need to determine what success looks like and this does NOT only include that we have all the required functionality in SAP CRM at the end of this program/project. This needs to include much more than gathering the business requirements for the new system, determine what functionality will change for the Sales Reps (e.g. instead of the Sales Ops Team entering a value in a field now the Sales Team will do it) and how we plan to educate the Sales Team (and others) about these changes in the most effective way (Training / Enablement).
The most popular change management approach probably comes from John Kotter, in his book "Leading Change" but there are many others approaches (see this link). As you would expect the big consulting companies have their own change methodologies as well and many practitioners add their own flavor to these methodologies. This is not an exact science but more an art that needs to be mastered.
Bottom line is that many companies still treat Change Management as an afterthought or something that is just not as important as many other tasks (e.g. in the example above it seems to be more important to have the functionality in SAP CRM instead of having the Sales Team on board to use the system afterwards).
I suggest that if the change management approach is not well thought through every project/program can still fail. Hence Change Management is something that should be front and center for every program or project that requires considerable changes and should have dedicated resource(s).
What does your company do in this area?
