Managing Business Change
Business Change involves evolving the way we work in response to environmental, cultural, political, and technological changes in our operating environment.
Change is essential to sustain, grow, or even reduce the business as needed.
Is a structured process that introduces new capabilities effectively, economically, and transparently.
Business change effects:
People
Processes
Systems
The Impact of Business Change
- It provides structure and organization with clearly defined activities and sequences.
- It ensures that only the minimal and necessary commitment/effort and cost is expended at each stage.
- Failure to respond appropriately to a need for change often results in adverse impacts:
Financial  |  Reputation  |  Regulatory  |  EnvironmentalÂ
- Often, the impacts are not considered across all lateral business functions.
Rationale for change
- To boost overall revenue and profitability.
- To reduce the cost of delivering products and services.
- To contribute to increased profit margins.
- To implement new technologies to enhance business efficiency.
- To achieve better control of operating costs.
- To maintain or expand product and service support.
- To adhere to evolving environmental rules and regulations.
- To mitigate costs associated with fines and penalties for non-compliance.
What are the consequences of poor or ineffective change management?
- Prescribed processes and capabilities fail to meet the current operational demands for delivering products and services effectively.
- Poor consistency in implementing changes across different parts of the business.
- Differing processes and methodologies lead to fragmented service delivery.
- Teams working in silos, unaware of parallel initiatives that may have direct or indirect impacts upon them.
- The resulting changes are often:– Ineffective.– Incomplete.– Lacking in functionality.– Not aligned with the initial objectives.– Delayed or stalled.– Deprioritized, cancelled early
Managing the Change
Define the Strategy
- Defined by the Main Board
- What are the current Business Priorities
- Rules for handling Requirements i.e., Those meeting and not meeting the strategy
- Communicated widely and formally
Need
- The Need Charter is defined by the Business Owner
- PMO prioritises based upon Strategy rules and initiate research
- A Business Analyst and the Businesses Senior User will construct the following:
- A Project Brief
- The Business Requirements
- A Solution Design, i.e., the recommendations for the business
- With the support of candidate suppliers and internal Architects andÂ
other SMEs.
Validate the need
- Business Case
- Meeting the Strategies
- Product and service definition
- Current Situation
- Drivers for the Need
- Benefits of a solution (Financially orientated)
- Return on investment
- Full Cost
- Emphasis upon industry standard ITIL design
Deliver the change
- Using formal project delivery methodologies, the requirements and solutions defined are translated into delivery programmes incorporating:
- Build
- Test
- Deliver
- Reporting
- Emphasis upon Prince2 Project Delivery
Support the change
- Service Transition ensures that in Business As Usual, the new service has clear roles and responsibilities defined to show how the service is to be supported including:
- Architecture and Design
- Support Agents (L1/2 & 3)
- Known issues
- Change Management process
Continuous improvement
- Once in service, The Business Owner will via its Users, monitor the service operation and report the levels of success and score against the defined benefits in the Business case, i.e., Benefits Realisation.
- The Senior User will catalogue issues and features to be addressed in future development