Change Management

I recently had the great pleasure of speaking with Maria Darby, Senior VP at Booz Allen Hamilton and Dr. Brooks Holtom, Associate Professor at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. Their institutions are teaming up and launching an interesting program around creating a career path for change management.

I'm interviewing both of them in the next few days to get a better perspective of what they're thinking around change management is. Stay tuned. Until then, here are the highlights of the conversation.

Both Brooks and Maria see the term "change management"--over and over--broadly interpreted and narrowly delivered. Change management needs to be delivered holistically, by a practitioner who has experience (preferably) in the organization. Both see the need to create a set of criteria that equals a standard for change management.

Brooks made an interesting point about Google Earth. You can take a holistic look at the globe and see some of the connections. Change management is also a set of interlocking and dependent events: one change leads to a change in another." To make change happen, and stick, someone driving change management needs to understand the jigsaw puzzle of an organization. You need to understand a variety of dimensions: the organization, the technology, the policy and how people are going to be affected; how business processes are going to change; how the culture will help or hinder these changes, etc.

An important element often overlooked is that all change is personal. Sure, as an organization, you are changing so that the organization, basically, makes more money. To get there, don't forget the people. You need them to make that happen.

We are all too aware of IT departments driving forward with rolling out technology without any concern for how that technology is going to be received by the business units it's intended for. Big clash.

A change facilitator will get in there early. Dive in and make the user part of the process. Not only part of the process, partners in the process.

You also need to institutionalize change so that it becomes the norm and that people don't go back to the old ways of doing things.

Brooks and Maria both noted that while this isn't the first such effort with change management, they do think it's the most comprehensive. Also that it's the first professional certification that they're away of.

Final thought: neither used the word "user" when talking about change. They always said "people." To me, that's a key switch in thinking and one that everyone needs to make as they attempt change in organization.

To paraphrase fellow Louisianan James Carville, "It's the people, stupid."

Thanks for reading,

Bryant

Comments

[Victoria]

This is a very accurate encapsulation of Change Management. As a practitioner, I've experienced the struggle as a Consultant from the outside and as an insider. This is a discipline that students and professionals must be exposed to, and not just through b-schools. I think a powerful change management practitioner is a person with an analytical and empathetic mindset and skills across the many disciplines you mention above.

I applaud the program launched by the McDonough School of Business. I hope that they are careful about who they accept into it and about who they invite to teach it - real people facing real challenges.

Another excellent resource to learn about the discipline and approaches of Change Management is ProSci's Change Management Learning Center. You can find great stuff on www.change-management.com

[Dan Longo]

Bryant. Excellent points. Many of us have seen change from the 2 perspectives you describe, i.e. facilitated and rolled out. Facilitated change, involving the front line people works best.

An SAP implementation that used a long term plan, worked well in transitioning staff from a familiar mainframe application to SAP. Meetings were held to discuss what we needed to see in SAP, and how we work with information.
Suggestions were incorporated into the design of the SAP applications, as you say 'partners in the process', giving a little familiarity to the SAP functions at go-live.

[Debt Managing]

All projects are change projects. It is the technical project managers who need to integrate into the defined, planned change program.

True, too many change managers are wafting around with communications and 'readiness assessments' instead of defining exactly what has to change to achieve the desired business outcomes and then assign change activities and tasks to make it happen.

Some of these activities and tasks will be technical; the rest organizational change

The solution to integrating change is to instead integrate the technical project into the change program

Debt Managing
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