Sunday, November 22, 2015

CIO’s Digital Agenda IV: Managing Change Life Cycle Effectively

10:55 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Change is not for its own sake, but for improvement and innovation.

Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization, but more than two-thirds of change effort fails to achieve the expected results. What’re the barriers to cause the change failures, and how to make Change Management tangible rather than fluffy, and manage change lifecycle effectively?

Managing Change Life cycle Effectively

WHY to Change - The Symptoms of Dysfunctional Management? Change is never for its own sake. The true reason for the change is either due to the ineffectiveness of teams/organizations or the inefficiency of processes or practices. There are many common success factors in effective team or organization; perhaps every failure has its own causes. But generally speaking, what are the symptoms of dysfunctional management?

Strategy -Which Factors should a Strategy for Change Contain? The speed of change is accelerated, either individuals or organizations spend significant time and resource to deal with the big changes such as radical digital transformation or small changes such as daily betterment. What’s the strategy behind the change, and which qualities or factors should such a strategy for change contain?

Challenges-Five Aspect in Leading Change challenges: Change is inevitable, organizations large or small spend important time and resource to deal with the big shift such as radical digital transformation or small changes such as adopting a new software tool. However, statistically, more than 70% of change management effort fails to achieve the expected result, what are the critical elements in change management to overcome challenges, and how to weave them more seamlessly to orchestrate a harmonized change symphony?

Principles-Three Change Principles: Statistically, more than two-thirds of change effort fail to achieve the expected result. All efforts at having other humans act as you would like to depend in large part on circumstances, the number of actions/tactical moves, action sequence, and "action coordination" vary. Therefore, change is situational, these differences have to do with who the people are, what they plan, what and how they execute. Although there is no “one size fits all” formula for changes, you can set principles to make Change Management more effective and cohesive.

Pitfalls - Is “Pseudo-Involvement” the Pitfall of Change Management: About two-third of Change Management efforts fail to achieve the expected result, the causes may vary, is “pseudo-involvement” one of the pitfalls in Change Management, though ‘pseudo’ is ambiguous itself, it implies different situations in either reasonable or negative way. "Pseudo-involvement" is a pretense of engagement that, although it may have short-lived positive impacts, over the long run this pseudo-involvement fails to engage employees and overcome resistance. However, genuine respect for those who question change for the "right reasons" is an effective approach and is needed to help managers and employees get on board.

Delivery -What does a Change Leaders/Managers actually Deliver? People change for a reason; they must have a reason to want to adopt the change. The question to be asked is why are you wanting the change? What do you expect to gain from adopting the change? That is where the change originator defines their deliverables and benefits, in real measurable, quantifiable terms. But what is “Change Management” and how can you define its value? What does a change leaders/managers actually deliver?

Measurement-How to Measure Changes? We can only manage what we measure. Is change so hard because it’s so hard to measure changes? Organizations have so much difficulty measuring change for a variety of reasons such as miscommunication, hidden agendas, unclear goals and mission, poor leadership, "doing the same things over and over and expecting different results." Change is a process with known/ controllable and unpredictable/unknowable variables. Change is ALWAYS happening around us at work and outside work. Perhaps the difficulty in measuring change management is that the very thing we are measuring is changing. There is an inherent oxymoron in the term change management. We want people to change, and manage or control at the same time. That's like trying to drive with your foot on the brake and the accelerator at the same time. So to put it simply, how to measure changes, or more precisely, the change outcomes?

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