Friday, April 3, 2020

The “Nice to Have” Factors to Drive Change Management Success

We live in a world in which change is the norm, it is nevertheless true that change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary.

Change is always happening around us, with increasing paces. Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization. Digital transformation implies the full-scale changes in the way the business is conducted, such as mindset, talent, capabilities, structures, processes, technologies, etc.

The effective Change Management approach is logical and iterative, with the goals to build a high-responsive, high-intelligent, and high mature digital organization.




Have an advocate for change on the Board: Leadership is all about direction and change. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel radical change. if you want meaningful change in an organization, it will not really happen until you get buy-in and sponsorship from senior leadership teams such as the corporate board. Without this, you will get chaos and some temporary change, but not change that moves the business forward solidly. Leadership vision is to serve as an enabler, being coherent with their organization's vision.

“Change management" is the overarching umbrella that encompasses extensive planning, developing a shared vision, discovering the pitfalls of failure, addressing fears and resistance, communicating valid and compelling reasons for cooperation, recognizing the sacrifice and incremental success. The top leadership team such as the corporate board must push the change agenda, and pull the resources to achieve it.

Have Change Management processes that actually enable change: Most of the changes are complex processes, there is a learning curve behind them. The more transparent about a change management scenario, the less uncertainty there will be about the effort. The process of preplanned change shouldn’t be too rigid or overly prescribed, otherwise, it could create the bottleneck for streamlining change scenario. In fact, the dynamic change management process must be open to new insights and adaptable to emerging events. It is also good to look at processes in terms of the very characteristics such as flexibility, risk intelligence, value contribution, reproducibility, reusability, etc.

It’s important to have the team own a process by bringing them in early and getting their involvement in creating the process of change and enforcing clarity and transparency in communications, Make continuous engagement through formal and informal methodologies and best & next practices. Train employees across all levels as change agents, with leaders being enablers and facilitators.

Have a Center of Excellence for change: The large scale of change such as digital transformation is complex and risky, the CoE (The Center of Excellence) is often made as a competency center for enterprise-wide change deployment. The part of the CoE purpose is governance which is implemented more as guidance with flexibility through established guardrails rather than adherence to a rigid track.

In practice, often CoEs are created with the right intention, but limited success. As it takes the time to mature such practices. Most of CoEs are at an enterprise level; some do attract good people but are still limited in effectiveness due to constraints they have to work with and resistance from the LOB. Some attempt to follow a trend without enough preparation, knowledge or skill. Others adopt an authoritarian management style and give people a sense of hierarchical structure.

It’s critical to build a strong team composed with specialized generalists such as architects - who facilitated new initiatives with design and proofs of concept, and senior subject matter experts - who acted as liaisons to the business for both upcoming project needs and current project requirements, etc. If a COE is well planned, it is quite beneficial from both the value perspective and cost point of view.

Have the change mechanism embedded into the multitude of management disciplines and align the organization to create synergies: Change can be an opportunity, but at the end of the day, it needs to be all about moving the business numbers upwards. Change Management needs to always go hand in hand with strategy management, program/project management or talent management; concentrate on the multitude of business systems - cultural system, moral system, social system, material system, functional system, and the holistic digital ecosystem. with a clear business purpose and focus on getting change sustainable.

Business Change Management is managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working. In reality, though, Change Management in many organizations seems to be at the crossroad. Many times, teams have worked very hard to refine the processes involved with a change initiative, but if change mechanism is not embedded into the holistic business management disciplines, or change is managed as the other layer of workload or an isolated effort, it could be too costly or drag down productivity and lose the focus. Synergy creation requires process alignment and ecosystem coherence.

Have access to key metrics: Quantitative measures do play a valuable part in assessing, measuring, and quantifying change results. Change Management should make a measurement assessment via questioning: How do you design metrics to measure what changes and how these changes are measured? What are the relevant metrics and how can they be quantified and validated? The metrics need to be "SMART" so people can see what the outcome will look like throughout their transition.

The problem with many KPIs is that they are created and applied at a subordinate level without taking into consideration the possible implications for the organization as a whole. You can leverage a balanced scorecard in measuring the outcome of the change - in terms of the variability of outputs such as the delivery rate or quality level. Perhaps the most challenging area in which to measure change is with respect to changing a culture - how to harden the soft –measure the culture and sustain the culture through change management and PMO practices.

We live in a world in which change is the norm, it is nevertheless true that change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary, and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. Digital enterprises are inherently complicated, the highly intensive changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways, but act as a complex system feeding, amplifying and ameliorating the change effect. Change Management is no longer a one-time initiative, but an ongoing organizational competency and iterative business continuum.

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