Did you experience relocating from one city to another? If yes, you know “why an effective
Change Management strategy is needed when a decision is made to change a process or system” by relating your relocation experience with activities performed to manage a transition.
In beginning of last year, I moved from Jeddah to Riyadh for a new role to work for my current employer as a Change Management Lead. While I yet had to manage the business transformation in number of areas professionally (some of which I described
here couple of months ago), the intercity move taught me various Change Management lessons before I actually assumed the position. Among the key lessons I learned was
“change helps you in your growth”.
However, the
change has to be planned well to get the benefits it was opted for. In addition to planning how to realize the change, you need to include ‘people’ element in your plan. Such as in relocation example while you have to plan how your children will get admission in a school in new city (an implementation plan, in technical terms), you also need to plan how your children will cope with new environment (thus facilitating them in adopting new situation).
Similarly when a system / process is changed, you NOT ONLY need the
Implementation BUT ALSO a
Change Management plan and a good plan has to be detailed. It starts from creating orientation and includes ability of related people to do their jobs well, easier & better than before.
Take an example of training (which is one of the change management activities) when it comes to plan, you don’t just mention training on high level, rather you break it down in number of sub-tasks such as learning need analysis across groups, deciding on approach of training delivery (such as train the trainer in case of larger audience), ensuring trainers & trainees availability, scheduling calendars, seeking feedback etc.
The same is applicable for other individual activities you need to perform to manage the change.
“The better & detailed is the Change Management plan, the better & easier is the move from an existing to future state” is my conviction. What do you think?
