Organizational Change Management Improves Adoption = Success
As project and HR professionals, we are in the business of change.
Preparing people for change doesn’t have to be confusing and hard. Identifying the change and helping people get ready not only increases success, it adds to the bottom line as our change is adopted more quickly.
Change can be technological, a system implementation or upgrade; programmatic, such as the introduction of a new health care program; or cultural, like merging two organizations into one. The recognition that Organizational Change Management (OCM) is an important and necessary component to successfully implement projects and changes has increased the demand for an organized approach to change. Using OCM, people can adapt to a new way of working or adopt a new system. With OCM, change is more successful and less stressful.
I started my career in training and development and pursued a master’s degree in communications. Working with leaders to develop leadership skills led to a focus on crafting messages and stories to engage and enlist others in pursuit of a vision or goal. Facilitating sessions to redesign processes and creating innovative training led me to a role in organizational change, even though I didn’t know what it was. When my manager described the role as communications, training, and process redesign, I knew I’d found my niche and began to learn all I could about change management.
The goal of OCM is to help stakeholders adopt and experience the benefit of the change. The benefits vary with the project and are usually identified by leadership as the reason to pursue change. If we know what we expect as an outcome, and work with others to change processes to meet that outcome, our change is successful.
More than two decades after my first change management role, the skills developed during that project are still valid and have been refined. The result of my desire to make implementations ̶ particularly technology projects ̶ simple to get the business back to business, led me to create a new framework for change, the READY-Set-Change Model. Having a simple way to implement change makes sense. Let’s get READY for change.
