Change Management Focal Point and Accomplishment

Change is inevitable. Make sure the executive team first understands what it needs to change for shaping the future of business and build change competency to realize it. 

We live in a world in which change is the norm with rapid speed. Change itself has become unpredictable and evolutionary. Either individually or collectively, if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. 

The purpose of the digital transformation as the large scale of change, is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of business performance and organizational maturity. 

Set the right priority to change and improve the strategic responsiveness of the business: With exponential growth of information, continuous disruptions often driven by technologies and an unprecedented level of uncertainty, change management and strategy management should go hand in hand. Business leaders should be able to leverage information to envision not only where a company believes it is going but how it will get there and how it might be missing out on opportunities. Business change management is about managing everything that is necessary to get people to adopt new ways of working such as process or organizational change, digital readiness, or stakeholder management, etc, and make sure the work environment inspires positive changes, and improve the strategic responsiveness of the business.

Organizations have limited resources and talent, change is never for its own sake, it is important to prioritize things, enforce communication and have the perseverance to truly make the change happen and also sustain its effect. Change managers should make an objective assessment by asking: What is the organizational capacity for change? What shall you do to build or increase the business capacity to meet the growing demand? Assess to what extent the organization has the capacity to change in terms of people, finances, and manageability, and also forecast future needs. Leaders won't set priorities in vacuums, rather, they leverage the strategic planning to determine which business capabilities are needed to enable it to achieve those objectives and then, execute to build or solidify change competency.

Rethink and reinvent corporate processes to bridge silos and run a highly adaptive organization: Many organizations still get stuck at the low level of organizational maturity. There are some dysfunctional symptoms such as complication, inefficiency, or rigidity, etc. The organization stagnates because the business systems are no longer able to accommodate changing needs or too fragile to speed up. It requires some kind of rethinking and reinventing the corporate processes and creating that changed sense of support for adapting to emerging events. It is also good to look at processes in terms of the very characteristics such as flexibility, resilience, value contribution, reproducibility, reusability, etc. The process of preplanned change shouldn’t be too rigid or overly prescribed, otherwise, it could create the bottleneck for streamlining change scenario.

Change comes from within the hearts and minds of the people. High mature digital organizations are people centric. Traditional Change Management is often process-driven, but digital change management has to be people-centric. Change Management is a hybrid of both science and art as the science gets interpreted to suit the varying situations and drive change smoothly. The hybrid structure will overtake hierarchical control, and that flexible digital culture will become a fundamental organizational asset. The goal of optimizing business processes is to streamline communication flow, knowledge flow, idea flow, and therefore, business flow for adapting to changes and unlocking performance.

The focus of Change Management should include actions designed to sustain performance improvement and anchor change as a new opportunity: You can only manage what you measure, Change Management also goes head to head with performance management. The purpose of performance measurement is to bring tangible results and achieve business goals for change. It's not the use of KPIs per se, but the applications of those that lead to the desired change. Neglect to measure something important will create blind spots for business management to make effective decisions or drive progressive changes with speed.

It’s important to avoid various change pitfalls: Provincialism will enforce the silo wall and cause unhealthily internal competition. Also, don’t just scratch the surface to manage the numbers, dig into the root causes. Measuring only a small portion of what matters stops the management from seeing the full picture of what’s going on in the business and limits their view on how to accelerate business performance, anchor change as a new opportunity, and unleash its full potential

Change is inevitable. Make sure the executive team first understands what it needs to change for shaping the future of business and build change competency to realize it. For large scale business transformation, the organization has to explore digital in all directions, change the fundamental business model, culture, or other critical business success factors, avoid varying pitfalls on the way for reaching the next level of organizational growth and maturity.

Posted in: Business Process Management,Change Management,Performance Master