STRATEGIC CHANGE MANAGEMENT

Planning Strategic Change- Royal Mail

Planning Strategic Change- Royal Mail

Background of the Case

The rapidly changing technological environment has forced Royal Mail to abandon its traditional practices through the application of Strategic Change Management. This technique enables Royal Mail to survive in today's competitive era as they are not holding monopoly in the postal mail industry. Also, the traditional practices have become obsolete with the contemporary ways of communication among people.

Brief overview of Royal Mail

Royal Mail is the company that provides postal service in the UK. Royal Mail Holdings plc is a public company, to the status of joint stock Company whose capital is wholly owned by the British state. It employs more than 200,000 employees. The history of Royal Mail begins in the year 1516 during the creation by King Henry VIII of England's Master of the Posts (Postmaster), which later became the Postmaster General (General Superintendent Post).

Models of Strategic Change Management

Strategic change management is a complex task because the change itself is a continuous process; constantly emerging or unforeseen forces require "changing the change". Organizations are aware that, in terms of methodology, there is no single best way to implement strategic change. What may be successful in a context and in a moment of time may not be for other organizations operating in different contexts and at a future time (Burnes, 2000, Pp. 176).

Kurt Lewin's Change Management Model

In 1947, Kurt Lewin identified three stages of change. According to K. Levin, the final step is to "freeze" when we establish new norms of behavior. Following the old rules in any way "punished", but the new rules - "rewarded". For example, if the change was the shift to outpatient care and treatment at home, it would be a mistake to continue to assess the performance of in-patient medical institutions in the percentage of occupied beds. Much has changed since the first appearance of the theory in 1947. Kurt Lewin proposed three-stage theory of change, widely known as the Unfreezing, Transition and Freezing.

Unfreezing

"Unfreezing" may be sudden and unplanned. For example, an unexpected local disaster may force the public to question the well-established order of things. It can occur at the individual level. For example, a clinician, confident in his professionalism and mastered them treatments that may one day be shocked by him collected data on clinical outcomes, unexpected and disappointing. "Unfreezing" can be carried out at the group level and the result of informal conversations, comparisons with colleagues from other organizations or conflict of interest between the various professions, as well as could be the result of external influences emanating from individual patients or organizations such as the professional association of physicians-a or specialty. However, the manager who decides to make changes, cannot wait until there will be similar to "unfreezing" of the event. He must find ways to intervene to improve the current situation identify possible sources of resistance to proposed changes and find ways to overcome this resistance.

Transition

Transition - this is the second phase of a three-stage model of ...