Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Pre-forecast and Post-forecast of Change Management by Asking “What” Questions

The organization has to ask logical questions, forecast upcoming change with a certain degree of precision, explore digital in all directions.

The characteristics of digitalization are complexity, uncertainty, unpredictability, ambiguity, information exponentiality, and rapid change. Thus, envisioning and foresight are critical to navigating the organization into the uncharted water or blurred digital territories.

Pre-forecast and post forecast will help the company well prepare the change journey for either capturing the rising business opportunities timely or preventing potential risks effortlessly, and track actuals against the forecast with tangible results.


What will change about the business over a certain period of time in order to achieve the strategic plan? The goal of the business forecast is about predicting what will happen and taking steps further, what shall you do upon it. In the consumer-centric organizations, will you experience higher transactional volumes? Shall you make heavier investments in product development? Does the business need to make decisions faster? What's going on in the market? Where are the suppliers headed? Where are the competitors headed? And most importantly, where are the customers headed? Etc.

Forward-thinking companies leverage information-based analytics to provide business foresight and customer insight about upcoming opportunities or risks. The optimal prediction system should have the best results in different areas according to the specific or customized quality criteria. The management should also keep in mind, some trends are more significant than others in their impact on business growth. The goal of the business forecast is to predict what will happen and take a proactive approach to achieve strategic goals.

What is the organizational capacity for change? What shall you do to build or increase the business capacity to meet the growing demand? It's really important to be able to assess to what extent the organization has the capacity to change in terms of people, finances, and manageability, and also forecast future needs. Further, if radical changes are needed, does the change management structure exist internally to deliver on that? If not, should you look for a partner or possible acquisition target? Successful organizations see changes coming and do pre-planning to overcome the resistance before it even manifests, and show support of overall organizational growth or shrinkage.

Gather as much input from all the business groups including adherence to industry standards. The arrival of IT-enabled organizational capacity and capability on demand can significantly improve business responsiveness and adaptability. From a talent management perspective, business leaders need to define who you need to have those responsibilities, forecast the skills and roles you need to navigate the changes driven by digital trends, and ensure calculated business results are achieved on time.

What could cause change efforts to fail? What can be done to avoid it? Lack of a clear vision is one of the biggest roadblocks on the business transformation journey. Because leadership vision is to be the guiding light for change management, to clarify the very reason. Too often transformational change is acted on the basis of improving one part of an organization at the expense of other parts of the organization. To dig deeper, the main reason to cause change failure is that up to this point in time, most leaders have been silo managers and don't really have the business skills or personality traits to shape “a big picture,” for steering the business forward smoothly.

The other reason for change failure is resistance to change and the inability of leaders to deal with resistance smoothly. There are some additional factors to cause failure: Fear of the unknown; fear of failure! Competency at all levels; complacency and comfort with the status quo; timing; ”perceived" cost of transformation; unwilling to make the effort, etc. Forecasting and brainstorming scenarios for failure in the future helps everyone be clear about what you don't want to happen and what can be done to avoid it.

What are the impacts of those changes on the organization? What should you do to measure the success of the change? Every aspect of change should have a measure. Making an objective change impact assessment is an important step in building the organizational level change management competency and achieving high-performance business results. Statistically, change management has a very low success rate. You have to be honest about it and should have the measures laid out beforehand to “post forecast” the change impact.

There needs to be some way to measure change, whether quantitative or qualitative, anecdotal, or empirical. Although change measurement is difficult because the things you try to measure keep changing. Change impact measurement needs to be multifaceted because the associated change benefits can be achieved via financial, market share, productivity, speed, or innovation perspective.

Change is continuously happening in the environment of a company. The desires of stakeholders, clients, and employees are evolving naturally. The organization has to ask logical questions, forecast upcoming change with a certain degree of precision, explore digital in all directions and change to the fundamental business model, culture, or other critical business factors for reaching the next level of organizational growth and maturity.











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