Stay agile to manage change
Learn why managing the change process helps support business agility, so you can respond to market opportunities and deal with regulatory pressure faster.
Over the last four weeks, I’ve shared my thoughts on the wonderfully underrated topic of management of change (MoC).
I’ve argued that it is vitally important to have a firm grasp on analyzing, processing and monitoring the execution of changes throughout your process and application landscape.
Why? Imagine spending considerable time and effort in documenting your applications and processes that make sure that you reach strategic targets, only to find that if you do not maintain them, they will be outdated before you know it.
In this increasingly faster changing environment, this agility will separate the high performers from the sub-par performers.
In this monthly blog I will deal with four topics around managing change:
- More change?
- Consolidation is the name of the game
- Be firm, know your mandate
- MoC ecosystem
More change?
Change seems to be the only constant in today’s world. Organizations – especially those operating on a global scale – see the pressure to keep up with these changes increase almost daily.
To cope with this, your organization must both navigate the management of change (to processes, applications, etc.) and change management (on behaviors and cultures and more). The main reasons for engaging in management of change first and foremost is to keep everything up to date and aligned. The last thing you want to happen to start your next improvement from an outdated starting point.
Read more about this here.
Consolidation is the name of the game
The main challenge with managing changes is that they are hardly ever an isolated event. Processes and applications are very interconnected in today and changes to processes often will have an impact on the supporting applications. This impact can be anything from insignificant all the way up to critical. The major question is: Will you be able to identify this impact before you try to execute the requested change?
The natural consequence is that you need to consider the management of change processes for processes and for applications as one consolidated process. You simply cannot afford them to be separate processes anymore, the risks of unexpected side-effects are too high. You can read more about this here.
Be firm, know your mandate
Management of change sometimes boils down to a show-down of organizational/political force. By this I mean that sometimes changes can have consequences that are not always appreciated by everyone. In some cases, people will try to influence, or even worse, frustrate the decision-making process around any given change request therefore the department trying to process the change request finds itself in the middle of a political argument (that probably has nothing to do anymore with the actual change request).
Senior management involved in the management of change process must be firm when it comes to executing the process – especially when a change request has been approved by the appropriate governing body. Learn more about this here.
The management of change ecosystem
A good, smoothly operating the management of change process helps to support business agility, allowing you to respond faster to market opportunities or cope quicker with increased regulatory pressure. Without it, your time to market will increase and given the importance of the first mover advantage, this increase in lead time will be costly.
Nevertheless, the management of change process is not a stand-alone process, it lives within an entire ecosystem of related processes, most of them with their very own application support. The alignment within this ecosystem is key to ensure a MoC process working effectively. Find out more about this here.
Speaking of MoC, Software AG’s CEO Sanjay Brahmawar spoke to Hendrick Deckers at CIONET recently about agility and management of change. You can watch it here.