Major Forces Causing the Morphing of Change Management

As we settle in to 2019 let's recap on how change management has evolved over the past years.

According to Prosci the focus of change management was on improving our collective understanding of human beings, how we experience change and how our human systems interact and react. This provided insights, research and frameworks for understanding successful change. And now change management is known as a critical component to most projects, with different approaches and methodologies to suit each project. With that said ,below are some of the major forces that are influencing the morphing of change management.

Technology

With advancements in technology becoming more frequent in trying to meet customer requirements or revolutionising the ease of doing business. Organisations now more than ever need to implement change management programs to assist their employees to learn and adapt to the changes that the organisation would be taking in order to keep up with consumer requirements and competition. This has influenced some change models to change and use a Down- Top approach.

Global Trade

With the increase in global trade, organisations have to implement changes quicker. To stay relevant in the marketplace, organisations also need to have internal change agents as opposed to having to outsource change consultants which can be expensive, it is a better alternative to have some internal employees trained in change management so that by the time the organisation requires change experts some of the costs of implementing such a programme would be cut down. Global trade has played a role in the expansion of change management resulting in a demand for more change management experts.

Culture

As every organisation has its own unique culture, there are some cases in which culture is not factored in when implementing change management processes. Since there is no concrete way of measuring culture it is quite a challenge to change it if it is a necessary step for an organisation to achieve its objectives. This has influenced the change

management industry in forming different frameworks and methodologies that would be closely applicable to successfully enforce change within an organisation without necessarily disrupting an organisations culture or if necessary gently shift an organisations culture to its desired state.

Change management has become an integral part for any organisation that is in need of a successful transformation and for it to be a useful transformational tool it also needs to continuously evolve its concepts and models to be able to stay relevant.