What is change management?

At the fundamental level, Change Management is related to the organization’s understanding of risk and managing the risk when implementing a change.

Change management is the discipline that guides how we prepare, equip and support people to successfully adopt change, which in turn drives organisational success, deliverables, and outcomes.

Change management is about helping people effectively transition through change.

Allows teams to deliver results on each change more effectively and build competencies that grow capacity to tackle more changes over time.

Provides employees with the preparation, support and skills they need to move into a new operating environment.

Focuses on helping people change the way they do their jobs, improve efficiencies and streamline processes.

Effectively supports and equips people impacted by a change to produce successful outcomes.

Proactively demonstrates that employees are valued during times of change.

Key benefits of change management are:

• increased preparedness & support for people

• increased change success

• higher employee engagement

• increased probability of change success

  • Six times more likely to meet objectives

  • Five times more likely to stay on schedule

  • Two times more likely to stay within budget

• decrease in implementation time

• less change resistance

• holistic impacts are identified

• people dependent returns on investment are identified and measured

The goal of Change Management is to establish a set of agile and efficient standard procedures that drastically minimize the risk and impact of the addition, modification or removal of a service, procedure, component, or business artefacts that affect the organisation's services, functions, products or operations.

Change management is a specialised leadership practice that incorporates analysis, planning, support, communication, evaluation, and continuous improvement. It relies on a sound knowledge of business practices, risk management, agile and systems thinking and a common-sense approach that looks to reduce bureaucracy without jeopardizing the operations of the organisation.

ITIL (v4.0 Section 5.1.6) states that the purpose of the change management practice is to ensure that changes in an organisation are smoothly and successfully implemented and that lasting benefits are achieved by managing the human aspects of the change.

Change management, though used to minimize risk, is different to risk management. Risk management teaches us to accept risk, ignore risk, reduce risk, or exploit risk based on business strategy and our capabilities, whereas change management teaches us to manage risk within the organization. The concepts can and should be used together.

Why do we do it?

Change is not only constant but part of the process of continuous improvement and adjustment to internal and external factors. Change occurs within organisations every day, from how tasks are undertaken, the development of strategies and new products, and the systems and processes that affect work to changes in the environment.

Any changes that may affect operations, safety and risk or quality will be adequately assessed and must be approved by management or a designated representative of management before implementation.