Johannesburg, 27 Feb 2012
By Johan Viljoen, principal analyst, Ovations.
The ability to evolve and modify business processes and structures according to market trends is vital to the success of every business. Today, failure to rapidly implement operational change can result in threatening shortfalls within an organisation's service offering.
For this reason, businesses have placed increasing focus on project management as a tool to manage transformation. Although this ensures the effective execution of assignments, it gives little focus to the individuals expected to interact with new technology or corporate governance on a daily basis.
Without employee buy-in and understanding, new projects and methods are often dismissed as tedious or overly complicated. As a result, these endeavours often fail to perform according to long-term expectations and are sometimes written off as costly corporate disappointments.
Where project management focuses on the technical side of change by developing a set of specific plans and actions to achieve the change, change management offers an approach to build support, address resistance and develop the required knowledge and skills required to implement the change.
It is vital that South African organisations engaging in transformation on a project management basis appreciate the importance of change management to this process. Without it, businesses run the risk of applying costly improvements, which are misunderstood or regarded as unimportant by staff.
Although this concept may seem complex, it can be easily defined on three levels: strategic, tactical and operational.
At a strategic level, change management ensures that leadership figures understand the change that is taking place and the reasoning behind it. These are the individuals who will not only be tasked with communicating the transformation to their respective teams, but also with enforcing new standards.
By engaging with managerial personnel at all levels of the business, change management ensures that the staff body comprehends and buys-in to new processes from the top down.
Change management at a tactical level focuses on ensuring structured support across the broad scope of the organisation prior to transformation, with the intent to eliminate inefficiencies or misunderstandings.
Put more simply, tools such as a change impact index, a change characteristics assessment, a stakeholder matrix, and a change readiness assessment pinpoint where problems are likely to occur and offer an organised approach towards these issues.
At an operational level, change management deals with day-to-day, on-the-ground difficulties that may occur as a result of transformation. Here, human resources personnel closely engage with change management co-ordinators to ensure that the internal procedures designed to deal with staff concerns or complications are effective.
Like project management, change management efficiently assesses and rectifies the challenges surrounding transformation within an organisation, but on a personal level.
Some of the biggest mistakes a business can make when implementing change is failure to be directly involved with the project, a lack of engagement with all levels of management, not providing adequate resources, and failure to correctly communicate with stakeholders.
Change management ensures these issues are raised and corrected, allowing employees to understand the reasons for transformation, while project management executes vital operational tasks.
True change management should be viewed as the conscience of the project - its goal is to ensure that people's needs are taken into account and managed during a transition from current to desired state.
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