Change Management: A Negative, Overly Bureaucratic Process?

From the end user perspective, change management is sometimes thought of a negative, overly bureaucratic process. These users may say:

• “It affects performance of hard working people, stopping them for getting their work done, and slows down execution of urgent work.”
• “The owners of the process are more concerned about the process procedure than the immediate need for the outcome.”
• “Why change and implement a new change management process when everything is working fine, leave things alone.”

The immediate and bypassing the process need makes common sense to the person who looks at the process in this manner. These people usually never see or feel the downstream impact of the change when things go wrong. Or, at least, they will not take credit for the fiasco that followed. Then there are many people who are just trying to do the right thing and work hard, but don’t know how changes that they make affect the service value chain.

Change is hard. The industry feedback in numerous articles, white papers, and analyst research tells us so. Also, we see it and feel it to in our organizations and daily lives.

For change to be successful here are a few things to remember:

• Remember “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” a key need is people need to feel safe about the change, then the other higher levels helps them become apart of change. Being a part of the change is more than just being compliant, but also being compassionate about the success of change.
• Communication: What is the value of the change from the stakeholder’s perspective? Think of value in social, economic, and psychological categories (i.e. help society, help the company, help themselves).
• Create a “sense of urgency” as it relates to other things that have to be done.
• Just as IT change management is a process, it’s important to understand that some people will go through a process from rejection to acceptance. Manage every stage of their process.
• Make people feel a part of the team. Negative responses are encouraged.
• Educate on the positive benefits.
• Improve based on feedback from people and metrics.

Today if you research this subject, you will get tons of advice on how to manage change in your environment. Take what is useful, develop it, and make it a best practice for your organization.

Did you miss our webinar “Moving from Change Approval to Change Management”? Catch it on-demand!