Change Impact Assessment

Making an objective change impact assessment is an important step in building the organizational level change management competency.

Change is the new normal with increasing pace. The only certainty leaders of organizations will have is that their business will change. It is only a matter of time. Either individually or at the organizational level, change readiness is an important indicator of the business competency. Corporate change can be a simple modification of strategy, a business process improvement or a more radical digital transformation. The change must be defined in its base elements and associated benefits to be achieved via financial, market share, or productivity perspectives. The strong support for continuous improvement is an essential strategy. Overall speaking, Change Management has a very low success rate, how do you assess an organization that is ready for the change? How can you optimize the process of change management to ensure it's effective rather than fluffy? How can you measure change readiness and result objectively?

Change readiness can be determined via the change profile-scan: 'Change' is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients, and employees are evolving naturally. Successful organizations see changes coming and with preplanning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests. Too many organizations are mechanistic, inflexible and command and control hierarchies. Most of the organizations today are the “sum of functions,” not yet being a cohesive whole. The manual change is fragile and often temporary, it usually occurs at the behavior level. Lack of change review, reflection, and recognition often make changes not sustainable. Change readiness can be determined via the change profile-scan. When productivity morale is low, trace down the poor behaviors or lower-than-expected performances, and understand the causes behind it. The further analytics is needed for understanding the cause whether it is due to change curves, inefficient processes or practices, or cultural inertia. It’s imperative to awaken the changing consciousness of the people. The human element of change entails a people-centric approach to change management style. Change readiness also reflects whether Change Management is a “snapshot” of one-time initiative or an ongoing "movie" as an iterative business continuum.

Assess change management processes and disciplines: Closer to reality is that 'change' is continuously happening in the environment of a company. We are living in a complex world where disruptions and conflicts are continuously happening and that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many issues facing the business today. Too often the middle-level change managers don’t have the big picture business oversight as well. Therefore, sometimes, the large scale of change such as digitalization is acted on the basis of improving one part of an organization at the expense of other parts of the organization. Digital transformation is a journey and requires a larger strategic investment. One could look at change (things happening now) as the consequence of a transformation journey. Transformation is the change, but on a grand level, at the level of the system, differentiate in terms of the end result on a systemic level. It involves the internalization of the new values and conceptual model. It’s important to take the logical scenario, apply the right strategy and methodology to take change efforts in a structural way. It’s also important to establish a future state and understand the intended outcome of the future state. Change Management, therefore, should be an adequate, logical, and systematic effort to any environmental shift. It must be defined in its base elements such as process, structure, culture, and associated benefits to be achieved. From the change leadership perspective, change readiness starts at the top, how do you engage with today's management and make them change themselves into the role needed today for holistic digital Management? Those who can exemplify changes and prepare their employees to cope with all coming changes will be the companies of the future.

Change Impact measurement: Change measurement is difficult because the things you try to measure keep changing. The dynamics of the digital where change situations overlap can also make change measurement extremely difficult. Thus, Change Managers should assess: 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? It is one thing to establish a future state and understand the intended outcome of the change. But it is quite another challenge to implement and measure the business progress to the future state. Change indeed is difficult to measure unless all parties involved in the change take ownership of the change and see why and what the change is about. Externally driven change is much more difficult to measure than internally driven change. Because it is the lack of adequate control of the objectives, plans, program budgets, and key deliverables. Change impact measurement is multifaceted because the associated change benefits can be achieved via financial, market share, productivity, speed or innovation perspective.

If you have good change-readiness, and then you will probably be better at change. Synthesis of Socio-Technical Systems (STS) Analysis is the change impact model to measure change-readiness against the contexts of business goals, people, processes, procedures, infrastructure, technology, and culture. Making an objective change impact assessment is an important step in building the organizational level change management competency and achieving high-performance business results.

Posted in: Change Management