Change Management

What change management is

Change management (إدارة التغيير) is the human side of any transformation an organisation carries out. It concerns how people move from one way of working to another. It does not concern how the new system is installed or how a procedure is amended.

The definition names both ends of that move: the way of working that people are leaving and the way of working they are moving to. Change management is concerned with the passage between the two, as people make it.

A line therefore runs through every transformation. On one side of the line is the technical work: the new system is set up and the procedure is rewritten. On the other side are the people who did the work the old way and are now expected to do it the new way. Change management covers the second side. A new system can be fully installed and a procedure fully amended while the people who are meant to work with them have not yet moved to them, and that movement from the old way of working to the new one is the subject of change management.

Any transformation the organisation carries out falls within the definition, which does not limit change management to one kind of change. Installing a new system and amending a procedure both ask people to leave one way of working for another, and in each case change management deals with that move rather than with the installation or the amendment.

Why change management is separated from project management

Project management answers one question: was the project delivered on time and within budget? Change management answers a different one: are people using what was delivered?

The two questions are asked about the same project, but they are answered at different moments. At delivery, the project management question can already be answered, because by then it is known whether the date was met and whether the budget was kept. What the change management question concerns is use, and use shows in the work people do once the project has been handed over to them.

A project may be delivered on time, after which the team goes back to the old way of working. Such a project has succeeded by the measure of project management and failed by the measure of change management. The date was met, yet the team works as it did before the project began.

That is why change management measures adoption, not delivery. Delivery establishes that the new system or procedure exists. Adoption establishes whether people have moved to it and are using it in their work. At the end of a project, the change management question is therefore not whether the project was delivered, but whether the people it was delivered to have taken it up.

Resistance to change in change management

Resistance to change is not necessarily stubbornness. It may instead be a rational response to one of three conditions. Stubbornness is one possible explanation of resistance, and it is not the only one.

• A clear personal cost and an unclear benefit. The employee can see what they stand to lose in mastery and in speed, the command of the old way of working that they have built up and the pace at which it lets them work. What they stand to gain from the new way is something they cannot see. The cost is clear to them and the benefit is not, and resistance may be a rational response to that imbalance.
• No reason given. A change is ordered to be carried out without any explanation of what was not working before it. The employee is asked to leave the old way of working without being told what was wrong with that way, and resisting may be a rational answer to that missing explanation.
• Past experience. An earlier initiative was announced and then abandoned halfway through. For an employee who has been through that, waiting has become a reasonable strategy: rather than moving to the new initiative at once, the employee waits to see whether it, too, is left unfinished. The initiative that was abandoned is an earlier one, but the waiting it taught is carried into the change now under way.

How change management reduces resistance in practice

In practice, four measures can reduce resistance to change.

• A written reason. The reason for the change is set down in writing, and it is stated before the new system or tool is introduced, not after it. The order matters: the reason is given first, and the tool follows it.
• Involving the people who will use the system. The people who will work with the new system take part in its design. They are not simply informed of the result once the design has been settled. Involvement means they have a part in the design while it is being made; being informed means they learn of the design only when it is complete.
• Room for lower performance for a time. Productivity may fall before it rises, so a period of lower performance is allowed for while people move to the new way of working. The point concerns the order of the two movements: the fall in productivity can come first, and the rise after it. The allowance is temporary. Denying that productivity can fall pushes people to return in secret to the old way.
• Closing the old way on an announced date. The old way of working is closed on a date that has been announced in advance. If the old and the new are run in parallel with no end, the old way stays, because the old way remains open to everyone who has not yet moved to the new one.

How change management differs from organization development

Organization development (التطوير التنظيمي) is a continuing effort to raise an organisation’s capacity to adapt in general. Its object is the organisation’s ability to adapt, not any one transformation. The adaptation it aims at is general, rather than adaptation to one particular change.

Change management, by contrast, is tied to one specific transformation. It has a beginning and an end, and it has a defined measure of adoption: whether people are using the new way of working that this transformation introduced.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.