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AlignIT - Change Management Services

While Change Management is built into everything we do, AlignIT Advisors believe it is time for this crucial issue to be recognized as just that - crucial. Regardless of management's decisions, edicts, and insistence, people often resist change. If you do not recognize that paying proper attention to the humanistic aspects of change, your project will never achieve the results you desire and very well may fail. The people in your organization must be shown how the change benefits them in order to 'buy into' the concept. Although there is no guarantee that you can achieve 'buy in', you cannot afford to leave it to chance that they will.

What is Change Management?

According to "The Change Management Toolbook", Change Management is the process, tools and techniques to manage the people-side of change processes, to achieve the required outcomes, and to realize the change effectively within the individual change agent, the inner team, and the wider system.

There are a multitude of concepts on Change Management and it is very difficult to distil a common denominator from all the sources that are applying the phrase to their mental maps of organizational development. But obviously there is a tight connection with the concept of learning organizations. Only if organizations and individuals within organizations learn, they will able to master a positive change. In other words, change is the result from an organizational learning process that centres around the questions: 'In order to sustain and grow as an organization and as individuals within; what are the procedures, what is the know-how we need to maintain and where do we need to change?', and, 'How can we manage a change, that is in harmony with the values we hold as individuals and as organizations?'

Change Management has also to be seen in the light of the discussion on Knowledge Management, which took several turns during the nineties. When the establishment of an intranet was suddenly feasible to any large organization, IT and management scientists declared the beginning of the "knowledge society". The immature anticipation of knowledge management was that every member of an organization would be highly motivated to share information through a common platform and a quality improvement process would be enabled more or less by itself. It took only a couple of years to realize that this assumption was false. Up to now, there are no examples of a company in which transformational learning is facilitated by an IT system only, because the early protagonists forgot that information does not equal knowledge and that human knowledge is in the muscles of the persons who make the parts of a larger system.

"The intensifying competition for resources and demand for high performance are pressing firms to become more flexible, more results-focused, and more fast-acting. Companies are finding that such initiatives require able leadership, and the challenge for organizations and business schools alike is to help build effective leadership both in the next generation of managers and throughout the organization today." - Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management

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