INTRODUCTION

Change management can be viewed from two perspectives – from those

implementing the change and from the recipients of change. Your view of
change management varies dramatically if you are the executive demanding
the change versus the front line employee who may be unsure why a change
is even needed.

In many cases at the onset of a new change, neither the executive nor the
front-line employee is knowledgeable about managing change.

CHANGE MANAGEMENT DEFINED

The simplest definition of change management is;
“making change in a planned and managed fashion”.

Today’s proliferation of digital media is making the conscious practice of

change management more important than it was only a few years ago.

Organizational change can be defined as;

“any alteration in people, structure or technology”

Although change has always been a part of manager’s job, it has become even
more important in recent years.

TYPES OF CHANGE

Changes in an organization can often be identified as one of four types, with

the definite possibility of overlap among them:

• Operational changes affect the way the ongoing operations of the

business are conducted, such as the automation of a particular area.
• Strategic changes occur in the strategic business direction, e.g., moving
from an inpatient to an outpatient focus.
• Cultural changes affect the basic organizational philosophies by which
the business is conducted, e.g., implementing a continuous quality
improvement (CQI) system.
• Political changes in staffing occur primarily for political reasons of
various types, such as those that occur at top patronage job levels in
government agencies.
These four different types of change typically have their greatest impacts at
different levels of the organization. For example, operational changes tend to
have their greatest impacts at the lower levels of the organization, right on the
firing line. People working at the upper levels may never notice changes that
cause significant stress and turmoil to those attempting to implement the
changes. On the other hand, the impact of political changes is typically felt
most at the higher organizational levels. As the name implies, these changes
are typically made not for results-oriented reasons but for reasons such as
partisan politics or internal power struggles. When these changes occur in a
relatively bureaucratic organization, as they often do, those working at the
bottom often hardly notice the changes at the top. Patients are seen and the
floors are cleaned exactly as they were before. The key point is that
performance was not the basis of the change; therefore, the performers are not
much affected.

DEALING WITH RESISTENCE TO CHANGE

It is easy to change the things that nobody cares

about. It becomes difficult when you start to
change the things that people do care about—or
when they start to care about the things that you
are changing.—Lorenzi and Riley

Resistance to change is an ongoing problem. At both the individual and the

organizational levels, resistance to change impairs concerted efforts to
improve performance. Many corporate change efforts have been initiated at
tremendous cost only to be halted by resistance among the organization's
employees. Organizations as a whole also manifest behavior similar to that of
individuals when faced with the need to change. Change can be a threat to
people in an organization. Organizations can build up inertia that motivates
people to resist changing their status quo, even though change might be
beneficial.

Why people resist change?

It’s often said that most people hate any change that doesn’t jingle in their
pockets. Their resistance to change is well documented. Why do people resist
change? An individual is likely to resist change for three reasons:
uncertainity, concern over peronal loss, and the belief that the change is not in
the organization’s best interest.

Techniques For Reducing Resistance

While dealing with resistance to change, there are six actions manager can
use. These actions include education and communication, participation,
facilitation and support, negotiation, manipulation and cooptation and
coercion. Depending on the type and source of the resistance, managers might
choose to use any of these actions.
"ADKAR" --- A model for change management

ADKAR is a goal-oriented change management model that allows change

management teams to focus their activities on specific business results. The
model was initially used as a tool for determining if change management
activities like communications and training were having the desired results
during organizational change. The model has its origins in aligning
traditional change management activities to a given result or goal.

For example, Awareness of the business reasons for change is a goal of early
communications related to a business change. Desire to engage and
participate in the change is the goal of sponsorship and resistance
management. Knowledge about how to change is the goal of training and
coaching. By identifying the required outcomes or goals of change
management, ADKAR becomes a useful framework for change management
teams in the planning and execution of their work.

PEOPLE DIMENSION OF CHANGE

Research shows that problems with the people dimension of change are the
most commonly cited reason for project failures. In a study with 248
companies, effective change management with employees was listed as one of
the top-three overall success factors for the project. Helping managers to be
effective sponsors of change were considered the most critical success factor
overall.

Effective management of the people dimension of change requires managing five

key goals that form the basis of the ADKAR model:

• Awareness of the need to change

• Desire to participate and support the change
• Knowledge of how to change (and what the change looks like)
 • Ability to implement the change on a day-to-day basis
• Reinforcement to keep the change in place
BENEFITS AND SIGNIFICANCE OF
CHANGE MANAGEMENT

“Change is a window through which future enters

in your life”

Some of the unique benefits of change management from organizational

perspective are given below:

• Understanding environment (society, government, customers)

It is important for organization to understand, assess and gauge the
dynamics in its external environment in order to envisage and establish
an appropriate relationship with various actors like government,
customers and society. Therefore managers by knowing the subject of
change management can better be prepared to understand whatever is
going on in the environment.

• Objectives, strategy formulation & implementation (to develop

competitive advantage)
Second is consequent upon knowing the impact of change at
extraneous level on its own internal dynamics, and the foremost is
objective setting and seeking competitive advantage.

• Employees (trained, high performing work practices, reliable

organization)
The employees are the recipient of change plan. One such perpetual
concern of senior managers is to make organization highly reliable;
therefore employees ought to be trained and high performing one in
today’s hyper competitive world

• Technology Issues
Technology is considered the engine of growth in today’s world.
Perhaps the greatest challenge for contemporary organizations is the
acquisition and integration of technology in its strategy, structure and
process.

ROLE OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN AN ORGANIZATION

Change management plays an important role in any organization since the

task of managing change is not an easy one. When we say managing change
we mean to say that making changes in a planned and systemic fashion. With
reference to the IT projects we can say the change in the versions of a project
and managing these versions properly. Changes in the organization or a
project can be initiated from within the organization or externally.
For example a product that is popular among the customers may undergo a
change in design based on the triggering factor like a competitive product
from some other manufacturer. This is an example of external factor that
triggers a change within the organization. How the organization responds to
these changes is what that is more concerned. Managing these changes come
under change management. Reactive and proactive responses to these
changes are possible from an organization.

Change management is done by many independent consultants who

claim to be experts in these areas. These consultants manage the changes for
their clients. They manage changes or help the client make the changes or take
up the task themselves to make the changes that must be made. An area of
change that needs attention is selected and certain models, methods,
techniques and tools are used for making these changes that are necessary for
the organization.

When there is a process in an organization it is not an easy task to make

changes to this process immediately. Sometimes a single organization may
have varied business entities and changes in an entity may be reflected in
another entity. In such organizations changes are not so easy. There are
different types of organizations which have many branches across the world
with varied cultures. Implementing a change in such organizations is a task
by itself.

The change process could also be considered as a problem solving situation.

The change that is taking place could be the result of a problem that has
occurred. You should know that a problem is a situation that requires some
action to be taken positively to handle that situation. This positive action is
known as problem solving. The change process could be problem solving for
a particular situation. In this process there is a move from one state to another
so that the problem gets solved. The change process is leaving the current
state and moving to the final state through some structured organized
process.

Managing the changes in an organization requires a broad set of skills like

political skills, analytical skills, people skills, system skills, and business skills.
Having good analytical skills will make you a good change agent. You should
evaluate the financial and political impacts of the changes that can take place.
You should know that following a particular process at that instant would
fetch you immediate financial effects and start that process so that the change
process is noted by the management. The workflow has to be changed in such
a manner to reflect the financial changes that are taking place. Operations and
systems in the organization should be reconfigured in such a manner that you
get the desired financial impact.
Hence change management plays an important role in an organization. This
allows the organization to give a reactive or a proactive response to the
changes that happen internally or externally. Knowing the change
management and its process would help an organization and its processes to
be stable.

PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF
CHANGE MANAGEMENT

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand,

more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its
success, than to take the lead in the introduction
of a new order of things.—Niccolo Machiavelli

One of the most difficult problems organizations face is dealing with change.
In today's rapidly changing, highly competitive environment, the ability to
change rapidly, efficiently, and almost continually will distinguish the
winners from the losers.

Major organizational changes typically involve many different types and

levels of personal loss for the people in the organization. For example, change
always requires the effort to learn the new, which is a loss in terms of time
and energy that could have been used elsewhere. Although some may
welcome the learning opportunity, many of us don't want to invest that time
and energy unless we are dissatisfied with the current arrangements or see
powerful advantages to the proposed change. Upgrading to new software is a
common example, in which the future benefits may not be seen as sufficient
to outweigh the short-term investment required to learn the new programs.

Second, people want to feel good about themselves. Ideally, people are able to
take pride in their work, feel responsible for a job well done, feel they are part
of a high-quality enterprise, and feel that their time has some significance. In
many work situations, the work itself and the organizational culture make it
difficult for people to feel good about themselves. In these poorer situations,
people usually invent strategies to help them feel better about themselves,
and these strategies involve getting some sense of control, belongingness, and
significance out of their work. Sometimes this involves opposition to
management, on the assumption that management is always up to no good.
More commonly, the worker-management relationships are not completely
alienated. Still, the workers' strategies for achieving “good” feelings are
unknown to or quite misunderstood by management. Therefore, change
initiatives, unknowingly and unintentionally, threaten to cause the workers
serious personal loss. Not surprisingly, the workers resist and do all they can
to sabotage such change initiatives.
Third, change initiatives often require large losses for middle managers.
Generally, people perceive that information systems increase the ability of top
executives to know more about what is going on and to exert more direct
control. This means a serious loss of personal and organizational significance
for the middle manager. Sometimes middle managers fight this loss. Any
significant organizational change involves changing habits that is, changing
the way we actually do our work. This usually involves changes in the way
we interact, both with people and our tools. New systems require us to learn a
new set of behaviors.

CONCLUSION
It can sometimes be hard to separate out 'the change', project management,
and change management. In practice, these three components are intertwined
in order to deliver a positive outcome to the organization. However, there is
value in separating out the components. First, thinking about the three
components separately makes it easier to define and help others understand
these distinct elements. Second, separating out these three components is a
solid first step when troubleshooting on a particular project that may not be
moving ahead as expected. For instance, are our challenges coming from
issues around designing 'the change'? Are the issues related to the technical
steps, activities or resources (project management)? Or are concerns coming
from how individuals are accepting or resisting the change (change
management)?
It’s a truism that change is constant, and in business continuous change and
evolution is usually necessary to be competitive. So to a certain degree, good
change management practice simply means practicing good management,
and outside assistance is often desirable when true objectivity is required.

In the final analysis, the most effective change management is all about
articulating and sharing a vision, so that the people being affected believe that
adapting to change is the right thing to do.

Nothing is constant in this world ,

except change!