Change Management Essay: Strategies, Practices, And Models.

Question:

Discuss about the Analysis Of Change Management.

Change management is a systematic strategy to deal with the transformation and transition of procedures and technologies. The main aim of change management is to execute the strategies for effective alteration, controlling alteration and aids people to adapt to alteration. These strategies entail structured procedure to appeal for an alteration and mechanism to act and following them up (Bardus, et. al, 2016).   

The change management process should focus on how an alteration and alternate will impact the systems, procedures, and workforces at the workplace. There must be a procedure of testing and planning change, a procedure for communicating alteration, scheduling and executing change, documenting alteration and a procedure for assessing its impacts. Documentation is a critical element of change management as it keeps an audit trail and makes sure the compliance with external and internal controls such as regulatory compliance (Wirtz, et. al.,, 2016). 

It is stated that companies implement the change management initiatives in current scenario to deal with overwhelming challenges. The change management procedure is required to maintain accurate accounting system, application and influences workforce towards the change. Thus, it can be stated that best practices offer guiding approaches and aids the superior to align the scope of proposed alterations with existing digital and non-digital techniques (Luo, Maqsood, Yin, Y., Huang, and Cohen, 2015).     

In current business phenomenon, the business environment is characterized by prompt change. The forces of change come from the internal and external forces. The external environment entails different things like political and regulatory currents, increased globalization, innovation and shorter product lifecycles, and rapid technological advancement. The internal drives for changes include needs to drive costs out of the business by better efficiency to enhance end outcomes, forces to enhance growth and the requirement for the higher extent of organizational quickness. In addition, adapting and embracing these forces of alteration requires ongoing organizational alteration. It supports to decline the management concern (Martins, Rindova, and Greenbaum, 2015). 

The practices of change management have been fundamentally influenced by the continuing business scenario. This business is characterized by quickly fragment, demographically evolving, information-intensive, automatically wired and individually customized international marketplace. The change management practices become imperative for an organization, teams, supply chains and individuals to predict, adjust and adapt to a globe that demands promptness to survive and succeed (Kuipers, et. al.,, 2014). It could not be sufficient for a manager to deal as a firefighter and responding to change in a high rivalry marketplace. The existing and future business atmosphere is characterized by complication, improbability, and vagueness requires the company to predict and take preventative action in order to deal with rivalry threats (Hornstein, 2015).

In today business situation, leaders realize to enhance their leadership skills to manage the organizational activities. Changes process is focused by an organization to lead the organization and marketplace. Further, magnitude, pace, speed, and volume of alteration is considered by leaders to manage the business. In today’s organization, there is not necessary whether leadership role is at c-level, organizational project management or project management. Since, the demand for transforming marketplace required high leadership agility (Nilsen, 2015).

Strategies for Effective Change Management

Kurt Lewin discussed the model of change, which contain three phases like unfreezing, moving and freezing. It is stated that the change model could be explained as opening up the procedure, which undergoing change, creating and executing new procedures and then integrating and perpetuating, and supporting the new technique to perform the business activity. After Lewin model, there are several models emerged such as transition model, and John Kotter's (1996) eight-step process to lead change. These change models were supportive to manage the changes in the workplace in an effective and efficient manner (Touboulic and Walker, 2015). The significant strategy of using the change model is transforming the input into planning procedure for leveraging the strength of program and project management to manage the change.

The company should avoid implementation of the irrelevant and random technique to manage the change and execute the change approach. It should also focus on a feasible plan of action. Change management is an enduring procedure, which takes expertise, time efforts and dedication to execute and run. There is also need to involve the people and team member of an organization as these people are affected by the transformation. Before adopting the different effective and renowned change management strategy and models, a corporation should first figure out about the causes of changes and how transformations will provide benefits (Schindler, and Hilborn, 2015).  Following change management model is used by today’s organization to manage the changes:  

Lewin’s change management model is a significant model as it develops understanding about the organizational and structural alteration. This model contains three main stages such as unfreeze, change, and refreeze (Scott and Poteet, 2017). It is discussed as below:

(Sources: Scott and Poteet, 2017).

Unfreeze:

A per the Lewin’s model, the initial phase of change process entails the preparation for the change. It indicates that an organization should get prepared for the alteration and for the reality that change is required. This phase is significant as there are a large number of people in around the organization who try to resist the change and it is significant to split this status quo. The key problem is to describe to people about the causes of making changes in existing process and describes the benefits of that changes (Davis, et. al., 2015). This phase entails an organization to identify its core business activity.

Change:

This is the phase in which the real transition and change are implemented within an organization. This procedure may take more time because people usually spend their time to make new development, and transformation. Under this phase, good leadership and support are significant as these concepts not only lead to move towards the right direction but also make the procedure easier for team members who are integrated with the change process (Putnam, Fairhurst, and Banghart, 2016). The two things are required for transformation like communication and time to take place change in an effective and efficient manner.

Refreeze:

Under this stage, change has been accepted, holds and executed by an individual, organization, and company for having a stable position. As a result, this phase is called as refreezing. In this phase, procedure and staff start to refreeze and functions start going back to their standard rate and routine. However, this phase requires supports of people to ensure changes are implemented all the time and executed after the objective has been accomplished (Cavusgil, and Knight, 2015). Furthermore, employees get comfortable and confident for an acquired transformation due to having a sense of stability.  

Importance of Documentation in Change Management

Another model is Kotter’s change management, which is most popular and implemented by an organization. This theory discusses eight stages where each of them takes into consideration on a key strategy regarding responses of people to transformation (Hayes, 2016). Following are the stages of change:

(Sources: Arend, Sarooghi and Burkemper, 2015).

Stages of change management

Increase urgency –

This process focuses on generating a sense of urgency between the people so as to encourage them to move forward with regards to objectives.

Build the team –

This phase of Kotter’s change management theory is related with getting the appropriate individual on the team by choosing a mix of information, commitment, and skills.

Get the vision correct –

This phase is associated with generating the appropriate vision with regards to change. It is not just the strategy but also emotional connect, creativity and objectives of a business. 

Communicate –

Communication with an individual associated with change and its need is a significant element of change management theory by Kotter (Massa, Tucci, and Afuah, 2017).

Get things moving -

For moving and empowering the act, an individual needs to get help and avoid the roadblocks and execute the feedback in a constructive manner.

Focus on short-term goals –

Under this stage, the company should emphasize on short-term goals and categorize the ultimate objectives into the small and attainable element. Consequently, it is a good way to accomplish objectives without too many forces.

Don’t give up –

In this phase, persistence is the key to success and it is significant not to quit the process while the procedure of change management is going on as well as no matter how strong things may appear (Arend, Sarooghi, and Burkemper, 2015).

Incorporate change –

It is significant to reinforce the change and make it an element of workplace culture besides managing change effectively.

This is a step-by-step model, which is easy to track and incorporate. The main cause behind it is to accept the transformation and prepare for it as compared to changing itself. In contrast to this, it is step by step model as no step could be skipped to arrive at the next phase. The entire procedure given in this model could be very time-consuming (Hayes, 2016).

Conclusion And Recommendation

Conclusion

From the above discussion, it could be concluded that change management is a systematic process to deal with the transition and transformation of technologies and procedure. It is evaluated that the change management process should emphasize on how a transformation and change will impact the workforces, procedures, and systems within an organization.  It could be also summarized that the change management process is required to keep application, accurate accounting system, and influences employees with respect to change. The forces of change could come from the external and internal forces. The external environment includes a certain component such as increased globalization, shorter product lifecycle, rapid technology, current political and regulatory system, and advancement in technology. It could be also concluded that the internal drives for changes are needs to drive the cost of the company and the need for a higher degree of improved end outcome. It is also evaluated that two models could be used by an organization to implement the change process such as Lewin’s change management model and Kotter’s change management.    

Practices of Change Management in Today's Business Environment

It could be recommended that the manager should give the input regarding how the proposed transformation will impact workforces and they can also recommend the methods to apply change process that would be easier and more significant for the company. The company should focus on the need for the change as employees will understand the importance of changes for the corporation. It should also create a sense of urgency what the company is like currently, to how much better the corporation will be after the transformation (Cavusgil, and Knight, 2015).

It could be also suggested that company should be prepared through constant evaluation of a corporation in order to manage the changes at the workplace. The management team should assess the sales data, changes in the marketplace and activity of competitor to make prospect change. When a corporation can see the transformation coming as a result of its own attentiveness, then it could build confidence among them and increase morale throughout the change procedure (Putnam, Fairhurst, and Banghart, 2016).  

References

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Putnam, L. L., Fairhurst, G. T., and Banghart, S. (2016) ‘Contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes in organizations: A constitutive approach’, The Academy of Management Annals, 10(1), pp. 65-171.

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