change management process change management plan
It is necessary for our businesses to proactively know where our customers are going and how we can best exceed their expectations in getting there. Providing our customers, value, innovation, quality and uniqueness of our products and services has to be our focused and achievable objective as anything less is unacceptable to them. Why do many of our businesses struggle with exceeding expectations? They struggle because they fail to see, listen and be proactive. Instead they choose to wait, fail and react. Businesses are complex systems where changes are mandated by our environment. We celebrate our wins and learn from our mistakes. Instead of waiting, we all need to be on the alert so that we may discover and take advantage of opportunity. We need to continually watch for nagging problems that rob us of both capability and resources while reducing or limiting our ability to be successful. And, the longer problems remain in our systems the more our clients notice, the mor e waste is being created and, importantly, the less our peers and employees respect us for wasting our resources and theirs.
Knowledge, experience and leadership, much like our business organizations, roles and processes are separate pieces of a whole and must collaborate together to be successful. Our businesses are basically divided activities of many operational and support segments that provide focused services and capabilities to our customers. Still, our business focus must always be on a personal level with our customer and how we provide value, innovation, quality and uniqueness of our deliverable to them.
It is important to frequently step back and look into our businesses to assess our products and services from many vantage points so that we may better discover opportunities to exceed our customers' expectations. The most effective and proven assessment approaches use phases of shoulder-to-shoulder assistance that finds problems and opportunities for i mprovement and then causes these improvements to be integrated into your business and sustained. During the initial phases, knowledge and experience is used to pinpoint gaps between your current results and the results that you desire.
This business assessment should initially compare business, customer and supporting results as this approach most quickly gets to what we most care about. It isn't how hard we try, or how much money we spend or even who we have assigned to fix a problem. We care most about results during this initial business assessment as concerns that impact these results are identified and managed later in the process.
Once the initial assessment results are identified and organized they should then be discussed with your managers and other experienced stakeholders. This is needed to not only seek out the improvements you desire, but also the details needed to weigh the value, cost and adoption methods of these improvements. Change is sometimes culturally and otherwise difficult and it is often necessary to assist or coach resistant stakeholders to ensure changes are fully effective and sustainable. Opportunities are discussed by your business team and evaluated based on mission, customer and service improvements and the desired direction you need to take the business.
Once the direction and future state of the business is determined, you then gather the knowledge you need to move and motivate the organization to the desired improvements if your more detailed due diligence finds that the details support the initial decisions. This requires your most experienced stakeholders and may require experiences outside your organization. It is critical that leadership be both invested and involved in both the direction, key decisions and changes required. Without leadership's participation and encouragement, many opportunities will be lost and changes will not be sustained. Every piece of this checklist is important an d no piece can be left out so that the solution is identified and then systematically implemented into operations and sustainment.
Then what? Unfortunately it isn't enough to just follow this checklist and declare victory once you are done. The opportunities may be within reach and the problems may be fixed, or not, and new problems are probably now known or old problems are now of higher priority. Problems must be dealt with immediately to limit their impact to the business and your stakeholders so not to derail the new opportunity or change process. If the problem is a member of the team, try to help them overcome their concerns or weakness so that they too can exceed expectations. It is far better to improve an employee than it is to start over with a new one when possible. Success is infectious in an organization and the credit for it is best shared. Share success along the way and confidence for change will grow.
Your business is only as good as the last del ivered product or service and will only grow if that product or service is the best available. Only these products are valuable today so if your products and services fall short of this you still have a very big problem and this should be of concern for you. So roll up your sleeves, and exceed expectations because anything less is unacceptable to your customers (and should also be unacceptable to your business).
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