Change Management

Change Management

Introduction

Change management is a generic process applicable to all kinds of organizations, which uses knowledge and skills to bring about substantial organizational change to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Change may be required due to an outdated organizational structure, poor responsiveness to clients, technological change, a merger, or an inappropriate organizational culture. In most cases, a combination of several factors is involved. While change now concerns most managers, it is only in the last decade that change management has become a distinct subfield of general management, joining project management, operations management, and services management. It now has its own research and theoretical literature, professional bodies, and record of successes and failures.

Discussion

Change is an inevitable part of any business. Successful change management is a key to success of any business. Over the years, companies have put their best efforts to manage change in the organization. Alongside organizations' efforts, researches in the field have been extensive to ensure progress in this area. Despite of all these efforts, organizational change has not reached the success rate which is vital. Complex change processes and the most advanced technologies have shown very marginal improvement in change management. Failure of change leads to a number of factors. Out of all, few are found common and critical to most of the cases. They are discussed in this article. It is found that rather than technology and processes, commitment of the people involved and knowledge from experience plays more important role in change management.

Organizational change covers most of the business functions in any organization. Change can be a little change in the system or a large scale change in the business environment which change the complete structure of the business (Allena et al., 2007). It is clear that larger the change, more the impact on business. Along with that there are more complications in the change as it gets bigger. Change management becomes more and more important with the increasing size of change (Weber et al., 2008).

In the past, organizations have tried delivering change at their best. They have put processes, people, checkpoints, technologies at work to ensure that change in the organization goes successful. Some of those changes have been very successful and some of them have been large scale failure (Fish & Zajac, 2006). Others were partially successful; leaving their trail in the failures resulted. As mentioned by Bain & Company, 70% of the organizations feel that their change management processes have not delivered expected result (Rigby & Bilodeau, 2005).

Reasons behind failure of change management are many. They include, not enough sense of urgency, not powerful enough guiding coalition, lack of vision, lack of communication, obstacles overlooked, no breakdown of the larger goal, declaring victory very soon and missing pre plan. These reasons are some of the main issues any change in the organization faces. However, the list is long and can certainly not fit here or can be completed (Todnem, 2005). Change management processes and models have been developed over the years, tools to ...