ABSTRACT

In a Nutshell: What Is Change Management? This is the proverbial question that has been asked from the beginning of time (management), one that many practitioners have heard from colleagues or coworkers in passing or in formal presentations, in and around the water cooler each day. While many of us may know intuitively what change management is, we often have a hard time conveying to others what we really mean by it. In thinking about how to define change, it is important to provide context related to two other related concepts-the change itself and related management systems. This book shows how the change management process works with the three management systems-quality, project, and daily work management-as critical disciplines that are applied to a variety of organizational change interventions to improve the likelihood of success and return on investment. Ultimately, the goal of change management is to improve the organization by altering how work is done. Accordingly, there is increasing pressure on organizations to deliver working solutions to business in ever-shorter timescales-without compromising quality. The processes by which solutions are developed must be agile and deliver what the business needs when it needs it. This book presents a framework based on best practice and lessons learned by the authors over their collective 100-year career-span. Its promise is to offer a flexible, yet controlled and sustainable, change process that can be used to deliver solutions, combining effective use of people’s knowledge together with techniques such as iterative development and modelling to achieve tight project delivery time frames. Typically, a fast-paced change-oriented change intervention can deliver a workable solution within timescales of three to six months, sometimes even within eight weeks.