Grappling with the change that new systems bring

Change is good.

Really? My observation is that few people accept change easily…which seems to indicate that they aren’t convinced that change is good. Mark Twain once said, “I’m for progress, it’s change I don’t care for.” Does that sound like  someone you know?

Implementing information management systems is a notoriously tough business…with a lot of failures along the way.

I found a quotation in a large organization’s change management manual a couple of years ago that said “How we design and deliver the change is a key determinant of the success of the project. The most commonly repeated reasons for projects’ failure are directly related to the human response to a change. Two thirds of major change initiatives are ‘brought to their knees’ owing to employee resistance…”

In his online document “Change Management 101: A Primer“, Fred Nickols writes…”The honest answer is that you manage [change] pretty much the same way you’d manage anything else of a turbulent, messy, chaotic nature, that is, you don’t really manage it, you grapple with it. It’s more of a leadership ability than a management skill.”

We know that we’re touching three things with system changes…technology, processes and people. Technology is the easy part. Changing processes often runs into the organizational change or people issue. So the hard part of a change initiative is organizational change. Most change initatives don’t include much in the way of organizational change management (or the owners of the initiative believe that training = change management), and this is why many inititives struggle to reach the potential…or fail.