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Tag: Change Management Course

What are the Best Change Management Strategies?

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Change is the only constant! Organizations have to introduce timely changes in their strategies, structure and operations to evolve and to match the ever-changing business environment. However, any attempt to change will have to deal with the inertia, and this is possible only with a diligently planned strategical approach. An announcement on introducing a change could stir panic in employees if they have no clue about what the change is all about. To avoid this, you need to communicate with the employees and educate them on the changes you’ve planned and why those changes are important. We are going to discuss some strategies to make changes as smooth as possible.

Change Management Strategies

Plan carefully
Planning is everything. Before introducing any change or even announcing it, you need to have a clear idea about what you want to achieve and how are you going to introduce it among the employees. Document the changes and things to do to achieve them, craft a detailed timeline and have a clear response to the potential concerns of the employees.
Be transparent
Confidentiality is a part of the change. It is a usual practice to keep the plan confidential among the top management. However, it is wise to announce the change before any rumour makes rounds among the employees. Rumours make it even more difficult to convince the employees as they have already made up their minds that the change is going to affect them and that’s the reason the management wants to keep it confidential. Announcing the change and promote discussions about it will help clear the doubts and prepare them to deal with it.
Tell the truth
Never try to sugarcoat the facts or try to be overly optimistic. This will only help to make the employees suspect the worst is to come. If there are any short-term negative outcomes, discuss them. Acknowledging the potential; drawback sand the effort to mend them will induce confidence among the employees and they will appreciate the efforts of the management.
Communicate
Communication is the key to win the game. Explain why the change is important and what benefits do the management expect from this. Be open to questions, hold team meetings to discuss the changes.
Build a Roadmap
This is important to make the employees understand the current situation of the organization and what is the organization aiming at. This will also help you communicate that the management has a clear thought and strategy to deal with the change.
Conduct Training Sessions
If the plan of change involves the introduction of new technology, make sure that you arrange adequate training sessions for the employees. Announce that the training will be available for them. This will eliminate the insecurities among employees that they will be left behind when the organization introduces the new technology because they do not have the skill or experience to use it.
Proposals for Incentives
One effective way to introduce the change is to propose some incentives to the employees. This will send out a message that the change could be beneficial for them and encourage them to engage with the plan and to adapt to the change with time.
Redefine Organizational Values
Employees would be ready to adapt and fit in with the organizational values. So, introduce a change in the cultural values of the organization and make it a culture of continuous improvement. The employees may respond positively to a new way of working if you introduce the new organizational value of a continuous improvement.
Conclusion
Change is a big thing, especially for employees. So do not expect them to change overnight. You need to help them prepare for the change and to deal with it. Ensuring their participation in every stage of the change is the best way to be transparent and to convince them that the change will bring positive outcome to them as well as the organization.

What are the Different Change Management Models?

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Change management is one of the major challenges you might encounter. It is possible that your team rebel against the changes you are trying to implement. It is a hard task indeed! No wonder that 70% of all change initiative taste failure. This is where change management models come into play. There are many change-management models for you to choose from. These change management models offer a plan of action to implement the changes, rather than jumping head-first to the crisis.
McKinsey 7-S Model
This is best used before you begin a change in the organization/team. This is used to comprehend why a change is essential at a given point of time. It helps you figure out what are the changes you should bring in. It essentially helps in introspection of a strategy, or to perform an analysis. McKinsey 7-S model is based on analysing the 7 elements: 4 soft elements and 3 hard elements.
Soft Elements
Shared Values – company values
Skills – core competencies of the employees
Style – leadership style
Staff – employees
Hard Elements
Strategy – business strategy
Structure – hierarchy
Systems – business processes and rules
This model suggests that the elements mentioned above should be aligned to ensure the success of an organization. For instance, if you are adopting a strategy to penetrate the market, you need to ensure that you have the right skills. The leadership style should be in a way that guides the staff towards the new strategy. You need a structure that supports this, and the values and systems should be in line with the goal.
Lewin’s Change Management Model
Once you decide on what change do you want to bring in, you can use Lewin’s change model to execute it. However, this is suitable for large-scale change.
The model operates in 3 steps
Unfreeze: In this step, you are going to let the employees know that you have decided to make some changes to break down the status quo.
Introduce the change: You start making the changes slowly, with proper planning.
Refreeze: You have already made the change and made those changes a part of the process to follow from here on.
Deming Cycle
This is suitable for small changes. This is done in four steps.
Plan: In this step, you identify the limitations and inefficiencies of the current process, contemplate and come up with a new strategy to improve it.
Do: You have decided what changes to make, now it’s time to implement them on a small scale so that you know how the new process work.
Check: You inspect the newly adopted process to see the improvements. You need to check if it is working better than the old one, and also if it is feasible to work in the long-term
Act: If the new process shows good results, you scale it up and implement them company-wide. If it does not show the expected results, you call off the changes and go back to the old process.
Conclusion
Changes are part of improvement. You need to revive the process and operations to derive better results and profit. Bringing in changes to replace a full-fledged running system is challenging, risky and scary. Reading about the implementation is very easy but is a herculean task to implement the changes.  You need to follow a proper plan to execute the new strategy without messing things up.  The change management models discussed above will help you plan a big change and to implement it.

Management Theory: Managing Organizational Design and Change

Posted on by Imarticus Learning

Design and change are highly interchangeable when it concerns the daily processes of any organization, and the process can be elaborated by looking at the inherent methodologies that concern both these subjects. Change is continual; it does not stop, and business processes change the condition and equilibrium of a particular organization status in the market even to the slightest extent. Designing begets change, which upon further consideration can be stated like this: “Warranted change can only happen after a particular organizational design is consolidated, implemented and upgraded as time passes on.” In this article, we shall take an in-depth look at both of these phenomena and shall discuss in detail appropriate strategic management as well as change management.

Organizational design

Design is actually a step-by-step methodology whereby any accomplished business analyst can recognize and take stock about the certain dysfunctional elements within an organization like workflow, structure, system, and procedure, is redesigned and re-implemented so as to perfectly fit with the current goals of the organization in order to develop new strategies that can implement change in an appropriate and effective fashion. This initiation, deployment and developing new strategies often take place on the two key aspects of any business: technical and people.
Perfect strategy management would intrinsically link the two in a common thread resulting in an unparalleled success and prosperity for the business in question whilst also touching and improving every other aspect that has an effect on the well-being and state of the organization, including increased profitability, reduced costs, improved efficiency and cycle time amongst many other miscellaneous factors. The end goal of any business should, however, be to potentially increase the scope and growth of the business in question. In effect, businesses generally look to incorporate people to the individual sections of the core business processes, systems, and technology. This is a key concept of proper strategic management as without the workforce there wouldn’t be any chance to make the company work under any number of possible conditions whatsoever.
However, business designs are subjected to change on a much more frequent basis than anyone might presume under normal circumstances. As the status, scale and scope of a particular business grow over time, there are a plethora of challenges, which would have to be determined and resolved in an effective way so that the digression of the business is avoided under any possible circumstance. Amongst such a state of affairs, it would become extremely hard for any company to effectively make use of the basic tenets or steps that effectively teaches how to properly design the current state of the organization properly. This methodology is uniformly taught across all forms of business analyst course, and its steps have been enlisted below:

  • Chartering the design process
  • Assessing the current state of the business
  • Designing the new organization
  • Implementing the design effectivelyAgile Business Analysis Course

Organizational change

On the other side of the spectrum, there is change management, which effectively takes stock about the state of the company from a wide variety of aspects and divisions, and manipulating them in some fashion or other in order to intrinsically favor the interests of the organization in question. For business analysts, this application and determination process might seem a little bit tricky, but the main cornerstone of any change management strategy is based on the intrinsic human nature includes the process and preparedness of human beings to adapt to the changes happening around them. Strategies can be developed either for the purpose or because of implementing a certain instance of change in the organization.
This organizational change is important for the interests of a particular business, especially in the long run. As such, such implementation of change often runs with a veritable target in achieving the most optimum state one may effectively get through the correct implementation of the change in the context of the organization itself.
Change management, in this particular case, is actually ideal for application, especially in a variable business environment, such as a response to a disaster level problem with respect to the state of the organization in question, or is actively brought about by a wrinkle happening in the environmental factors around the organization itself. Essentially, successful organizational change is not just a fluke incident, but it requires very advanced and complex understanding of management techniques and models, most of which are generally covered in business analyst courses. As many management experts will proclaim, a change in guard within the management of a particular company also invokes a significant amount and extent of change in and of itself.
Management studies often describe this phenomenon as being a state of transition between the current and future one, to which the state of the company is being directed effectively. It has been observed quite distinctly through many change management instances and studies that the aforementioned “transition” may take place if there happens to be any kind of shift both in the internal and external contexts of the organization in question. As such, change is always happening and continuing because every other aspect that might influence a particular business entity always are subjected to transformation in some shape or form.
Business analysts often debate and discuss about these factors that may influence a particular industry or organization; their job is to essentially understand the state of the market at large as well as the internal state of the organization in order to keep proper track of a change that is just beyond the horizon of occurrence, and develop an abstract design in order for the same business to effectively counter and adapt against.