Change management is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. It is an enabling framework for managing the people side of change, which includes preparing, supporting, and equipping individuals to drive change success. Change management is not just communication and training, nor is it simply managing resistance. Effective change management follows a structured process and employs a holistic set of tools to help people engage, adopt, and use a change in their day-to-day work.
Change management deals with many different disciplines, from behavioral and social sciences to information technology and business solutions. It considers the full organization and what needs to change, while change management may be used solely to refer to how people and teams are affected by such organizational transition. Change management is often used in a project-management context as an alternative to change control processes, where changes to the scope of a project are formally introduced and approved.
The drivers of change may include the ongoing evolution of technology, internal reviews of processes, crisis response, customer demand changes, competitive pressure, acquisitions and mergers, and organizational restructuring. Transformational changes are larger in scale and scope and often signify a dramatic and, occasionally sudden, departure from the status quo.
Change management is a leadership competency for enabling change within an organization. It is also a strategic capability designed to increase the change capacity and responsiveness of the organization. Although competency varies according to your relationship to change, organizations are more effective and successful when they build change management competencies throughout their ranks.
