We have all been part of an effort that, for whatever reason, did not turn out as we intended. It could have been something as simple as that new tortilla recipe you wanted to try. Why didn’t your tortilla look the same as the pretty image on recipes.com? Or it could have been the 2013 launch of healthcare.gov, the troubled web portal for the Obamacare initiative.
Somewhere along the way, something went wrong with that tortilla and with the Obamacare website. Identifying what went wrong (and quickly) is a big part of what change management is all about.
What is change management?
Whether the goal is to make an omelette or to implement healthcare.gov, it is important to realize that these products were created only after completing many individual steps. In the case of the omelette, the eggs are beaten, the butter is heated, the fillings are cut into cubes and so on. Your future omelette will eventually come from this ingredient soup.
This ingredient soup undergoes major and minor changes as you progress through the recipe. The current state of your tortilla can be called “as is”. From this state as it is, he makes a series of observations and forms the mental “reference” image of his omelette. As you move to the next step in your recipe, remember this baseline and monitor what the next change does to your effort. You can likely identify a problem faster by paying attention to how things looked before.
Much of change management is simply empirical observation. With a good history of changes and whether the result was positive or negative, bad results can often be minimized and good results more frequent.
Advantages of change management
In practice, change management has great practical value for the company. Many organizations are subject to regulatory agencies or laws. For example, US hospitals and healthcare providers are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
A technical provision of HIPAA is that healthcare providers must protect themselves against unauthorized changes to a medical record. In this scenario, change management is not simply a benefit, but a requirement. For example, if a patient has a documented history of penicillin allergy and their record is mistakenly updated to report that no allergies are present, monitoring can help detect an otherwise fatal error.
For companies that involve many steps or many changes, change management can provide a clear rollback path. The record of change is the “breadcrumb trail” that brings your product back to working order. Suppose you are working in an Excel spreadsheet with many embedded formulas, each of which refers to a specific location on the spreadsheet.
If you start making many changes at once, moving between columns and updating formulas in the worksheet, some of your formulas may no longer work. But what change did your spreadsheet break? If you can’t identify the changes that were made, you may need to redo all that work.
Another advantage is that it helps preserve institutional knowledge. In large programming projects, for example, the product manager can review the status of the application over time. Each code change or revision is generally recorded in a repository as a kind of file. The complete evolution of the application project can be observed by looking at these snapshots over time of the code. As a result, one can begin to understand how the product has changed over time, even if the original programmers have long since left the company.
Change management challenges
Change management is often unpopular due to the higher overhead it entails. In fact, if done wrong, it can bog down the production of the entire organization.
There is a cost associated with managing change. That cost may come from the time it takes to train staff to use the new process. There may also be capital expenditures if the business decides to purchase a CM software application.
Perhaps the most serious challenge to consider for change management is the overhead it can bring. If the change management process is more onerous than making the change itself, the CM process may need improvement. If change management is not handled efficiently, the new process may not gain acceptance and consistent use. Worse still, base personnel can quietly reduce their production to the company as a way to avoid using the change management process.
Recommendations for change management
Before implementing a new process or purchasing new software, the company must identify the key stakeholders for the change management effort. A project sponsor must be identified who will act as the project owner. Together, the stakeholders and the project sponsor must identify what needs the project must meet in order for it to be considered successful. Desirable features can also be included along with project requirements.
Once the project team is identified and the goals listed, the team must examine what resources should be involved in determining the steps necessary to achieve those goals. Many project objectives will likely reveal an interdependence between two groups within the company: for example, grassroots acceptance of change management systems and the ability of executives to provide an efficient and functionally relevant system.
Failure to comply with such interdependence can risk project failure. Therefore, it is important for the project team to have discussions with personnel outside the project team to determine what an efficient and functionally relevant change management system might look like. This can mean a lot of conversations and interactions with entities throughout the company.
If requirements, interdependencies, and functional concerns are addressed prior to implementation, the company will have an accurate idea of what its change management system will need to be successful.