Need help with change managment? Change management is a constant in the quickly changing world of organizations. This change management checklist will assist you to approach change in your organization in a systematic manner that will help you effectively implement the change.
When you take the right steps, involve the appropriate people, and tend the potential impacts of change, resistance to change is reduced. These change management steps help your organization makes necessary and desired changes.
Let's start with my favorite quote about change: "Change is hard because people overestimate the value of what they have — and underestimate the value of what they may gain my giving it up." --- Belasco & Stayer. Make sense? Fit your experience? Now, on with our change management checklist.
Change Management Checklist
This change management checklist will guide your change management efforts.
The key factors in successful change management :
- effective communication,
- full and active executive support,
- employee involvement,
- organizational planning and analysis and
- widespread perceived need for the change.
These are the big five when successful change is achieved.
Implementing your change in an organizational environment that is already employee-oriented, with a high level of trust, is a huge plus. Understanding and responding to the range of human emotions during times of intense change, is also cited as critical. All of this may sound straightforward, but your suggestions about how to do each of these successfully are priceless.
This article focuses on the key change management actions recommended by the majority of the change management study participants. A second article provides tips for addressing resistance to change. Another provides “voices from the field" and enables study participants to speak to you with their own words.
Changes Experienced
Change management study participants made their recommendations from their involvement in a broad range of changes. These are too numerous to mention and include downsizing; mergers; department and company reorganizations; implementing every conceivable initiative from the 1980s and 1990s including teams, self-directed work teams, quality, TQM, employee involvement, reengineering, management by objectives and matrix management; new compensation programs; changing work systems because of the Internet; implementing a strategic planning process; implementing new technology and software packages including MRPII and SAP; restructuring jobs; doubling production productivity; relocating facilities; adopting new appraisal processes; and changing work requirements, including doing more with fewer resources.
Change Management Recommendations
Now that you have some context for the changes experienced by the study respondents, these are the factors they experienced that increased their organization’s success with change management. Each participant did not cite all of these; I am highlighting those change management factors most frequently mentioned.
More rigorous studies of change management success and failure are required to assess the impact of each of these actions, but, I believe, the results of my change management survey provide you with great guidance as you embark upon your desired change.
Additionally, each of these factors does not occur separately from the others. They do not occur in a predictable sequence. In other words, portions of “Executive Support and Leadership” are usually happening while “Organization Planning and Analysis” is underway. You will also find overlap across all areas.
More Information About Change Management
- Change, Change, Change: Change Management Lessons From the Field
- Executive Support and Leadership in Change Management
- Planning and Analysis in Change Management
- Communication in Change Management
- Change Management Lessons About Employee Involvement
- Build Support for Effective Change Management
- Change Management Tips
- Change Management Wisdom
