What is Change Management and how does it Work?

One of the best descriptions for management is controlling chaos. Most organizations - including most businesses - exist in a constant state of change. Change management is an effort to take control of that change in order to achieve a set of goals.

Change management can be as simple as a schedule or a business plan or a complex strategy. Any effort to give direction to an organization’s activities can be described as change management. Change management today often involves the use of modern business strategies such as Smart goals.

How to Implement Change Management

The first and most important step in implementing change management is to decide where you want to go. This means sitting down, deciding upon a set of goals and decide how to implement them. Without such goals, there can be no change or strategic planning.

The Smart goal strategy of Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely goals often comes in very handy at this stage. Many change management efforts fail miserably because the goals are unrealistic or unobtainable or because nobody has given any real thought to attain them.

The next most important step in change management is to draw up a plan. It does not have the best plan or even a complete plan. Planning helps because it makes you think about the goals and the resources you will need to obtain them. General Eisenhower once said that plans themselves are often useless but planning itself is indispensable. He was absolutely right.

Once you have goals and a plan you can create a strategy to make the plan and the goals a reality. In the best possible situation the plan should match the strategy. If the goal is opening four new branches in the next year, the plan would include all the activity needed to achieve that goal, hiring new staff, buying new buildings, purchasing new equipment etc. and the strategy the steps needed to do those things.

Obviously, change management is not always successful. In many cases, plans have to be abandoned because they are not realistic. Yet

even failed plans serve as an educational experience. Failed plans teach you what you can and can not do and show you what resources you need. In many cases, organizations develop new capabilities that can lead to new profit centers even if plans do not work out. Change management then is the science of learning what is possible and what is not possible.