Change Management

 

A very central challenge of all management is to actually succeed with a planned development and change of the business or organization. To handle such change is a central competence of Momentus Management Consultants, who have supported various clients with their changes.

 

While the discipline of Change Management is broad and numerous of key factors may be mentioned, we have recognized that there is no single “silver bullet” that will secure successful change. Rather, it is composed by a variety of aspects that needs to be balanced, in a relevant manner and for the given situation.

 

We shall here mention three experiences necessary for this balancing.

 

§  The very formulation of plans for change may be the reason for failure depending on formulation and content. The reason for failure already in the planning stage may depend on aspects such as who was involved in the process; did the plans articulate the current situation, the desired situation, and the change plan? 

§  We need to realize that implementation starts before the typical implementation phase! Or to put it in other words: there is a difference between mental implementation, which typically starts when formulation of plans begins, and the operational implementation. Furthermore, several implementation approaches available focus only on communication and/or education. While these two activities are important, it is, in our opinion, dangerous to reduce the implementation approach to these two aspects, assuming that employees of an organization will change their behavior radically after having been informed and educated. 

§  The third point is about the insight that we need to adjust our maps to the realty rather than vice versa. The outcome of non-trivial development and change efforts shows as a rule that the result is never exactly as the plan intended, for numerous  reasons. As a consequence there is a need for an explicit mechanism to manage the change initiated. It is necessary to continuously monitor the ongoing change process to identify possible divergence between plans and the actual situation, and to make decisions on how to deal with any issues.  Performance indicators play a key role when it is important to differentiate between variables that measure the key operations of an organization, on one hand, and variables that measure the very change process, on the other hand.

 

Momentus Management Consultants have extensive experience from hands-on execution of changes as well as from a set of theoretical frameworks that provide guidance.