Management Plan: Transformational Change Management Plan
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Management Plan: Transformational Change Management Plan
Introduction.
The designed transformational management plan below serves a small-and-medium-sized public company that has lost business to its rival, therefore choosing to outsource much of its production operations. Based in a Midwestern town, the company is one of the largest employers with an above average reputation for employee welfare. To recover from its prevailing form of crisis, the Company ought to invest in developing a plan that will cause alterations in its business model needed for its corporate survival. Proactive adjustments should be made to the company’s vision accompanied by subsequent management of the alterations.
Some examples of transformational management techniques include “introduction of new technology in the organisation to offset any existing obsolete technology, product restructuring as well as implementing fundamental changes in the company’s leadership model, also known as transformational leadership.” (Anderson & Anderson, 2010) Transformational managers must not only guide the changes taking place in the organization, but also manage the employees’ morale, which is often a challenging issue when it comes to implementing the change (Umble, Haft & Umble, 2003)
For successive change to occur, the leaders in question ought to be well prepared as change can at times prove difficult to accomplish. The best approach would be one that optimizes the company’s available resources while yielding the expected results as the whole procedure can be incredibly expensive.
The Need for Transformational Change
Transformational change defines the shift in an organisation’s culture resulting from a change in its underlying state and process previously used. This change is meant to be 0rganization-wide and implemented over a period. (http://businessdictionary.com). The primary objective of a transformational change management plan is to enable an organisation’s stakeholders adapt to a new mission, vision and system as well as identifying sources of resistance to them. As stated above, many organisations will develop a transformational plan in an effort to respond effectively to a crisis or repositioning of its market position.
The company in question chose to outsource most of its operations as well as large laying-offs of its long-term employees in an effort to recover from its business crisis. A company cannot afford to ignore essential radical alterations in its business model and culture due to the loss brought about by its competitor. Changes are clearly critical for the firm’s recovery. Managers play a big role in transformational change. They are obliged to recognize areas of improvement and implement necessary changes to enable the company perform to its maximum ability. They should also bridge any gap between departments and maintain reliable communication across all aspects of the company.
When implemented immediately, transformational change management plans can be an essential source of competitive advantage. However, it is expensive, disruptive and difficult to implement them. Thus, an organisation can adapt other much easier ways of remaining competitive such as introducing innovative applications to systematize manual processes quickly and effectively.
Theories of Change Management
1. Kurt Lewin’s Model.
This model requires 3 actions: unfreezing, changing and refreezing. In the unfreezing stage, the organisation is prepared for change by creating motivation to change. The changing stage involves promoting communication among people and empowering them to embrace new ways of working. Finally, when the changes are taking shape, and people have embraced new ways of working, the company is ready to refreeze, which is characterized by a stable organization chart and job description among others.
The model is simple to comprehend and provides a very high-level approach to change management that covers both simple and complex issues. However, the change process can be daunting as people leave the security and comfort of how things have always been done to adapt new ways of doing things.
2. John Kotter’s Theory
Kotter proposes that for a change to be effective, 75 % of the company’s executives need to “buy into” the change. The model involves eight crucial steps; creating urgency:
· Forming a powerful coalition
· Convincing people that change is necessary,
· Creating a vision for change
· Communicating the vision to other members of the organisation
· Removing obstacles to change so as to empower the people needed to execute the vision
· Creating short-term wins
· Building up on the change
· Anchoring the changes in the corporate culture
This theory has proved to be successive and logical. However, if the steps are not followed subsequently, change is paralysed. It also requires a long time to implement which the company may not have.
3. Action- Research Model.
This theory advocates active participation in a change situation, often via an existing organisation while simultaneously conducting research. It can be undertaken by larger organisations assisted by expert researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, knowledge and practises of the environment in which they operate.
The model can be used in education by practitioners who want to explore their own practise. However, the model is associated with high levels of risk and uncertainty. The organisation has to analyse critically and evaluate practises in order to facilitate practical changes. The most successive way to implement an organizational change is to follow the outlined steps with consistent monitoring and reviewing.
Communication Plan.
Development of a communication plan is necessary for a change management team. Statistics shows that teams tend to communicate less frequently than they ought to during a project. Approximately 40% of the study’s participants indicated that communication within an organisation on a weekly basis yielded the desired frequency. Effective communication should be open and risk-free, where employees can fearlessly ask questions.
Various methods of communication include corporate newsletters, one-on-one meetings, emails, faxes and demonstrations. The organisation’s employees form the larger portion of the company’s stakeholders that requires the change management information. The information conveyed should comprise the organisation’s current situation, its vision after the change, as well as the impact of the presumed change on the employees. It should also highlight the basics of what is changing, particular behaviour and activities expected from the employee, procedures for getting help and assistance during the change and status updates on the implementation of the change.
The Employee Supervisor could give information regarding how the change will affect the employees as the CEO delivers messages about business drivers and vision. Collectively, the most effective mode of communication is the face-to-face interactions which include group and team meetings, presentation and demonstrations and one-on-one discussions. The company could also use emails as they are more efficient, as well as the company’s intranet websites. Of interest to note is that certain characteristics of communication such as honesty and consistency highly contribute to the overall effectiveness of a communication channel.
Implementation Plan.
Implementing the developed change management plan involves putting the plan into action to yield the desired results. The implementation plan entails: defining change management processes and practises of the organisation. This should cover procedures for handling changes, tools to be used as well as measurements for change management to ensure efficiency. The next step involves receiving change requests, ideally through a single change co-ordinator. The third stage is the plan for implementation of changes to determine certain aspects such as required resources for achieving the change. This will involve examining the change request prioritisation, impact of change to the system, back-out procedures and schedule of implementation.
The proceeding step will entail implementing and monitoring changes and backing them out where necessary. Afterwards, the company will evaluate and report on changes implemented. Feedback on all changes will be provided to the organisation’s change coordinator, whether they were successful or not. If the anticipated result is not achieved, then the company can opt to back out of the change process. Finally, the organisation will modify the change management plan if necessary as per the received feedback. This will make the plan more effective. The change coordinator is responsible for evaluating trends in the application of changes to see if the change implementation planning was sufficient. The company should keep in mind that successive implementation of their developed change management plan is highly dependent on effective monitoring and evaluation of the stages of implementation.
Reference list
Anderson, D., & Anderson, L. A. (2010). Beyond change management: How to achieve breakthrough results through conscious change leadership. John Wiley & Sons.
Umble, E. J., Haft, R. R., & Umble, M. M. (2003). Enterprise resource planning: Implementation procedures and critical success factors. European journal of operational research, 146(2), 241-257.