Today, the world is changing more rapidly than ever before. The expanding markets, technological developments, financial limitations, restructuring and mergers, new management philosophies, government legislations—all are putting pressure on organizations to change. However, while change has become a necessity for organizational survival, there must be some way to manage this process of change.
So as the term suggests, Change Management is the task of "managing change" in a more planned and systematic fashion. It is all about how to get users to accept a new business process and a new technology that enables it. The steering thought behind this management practice is: It is human beings, not technology, that make companies work.
There may be several forms and types of reasons for change. On a broader note, change could be either reactive or proactive. Reactive Change is in response to external changes—the changes in the macro-environment are not within the control of an organization. On the other hand, the source for Proactive Change is internal—it is initiated by the organization to achieve a specific goal. The process of change has been wonderfully characterized by Kurt Lewin, the father of social psychology, as having three basic stages: unfreezing, changing and re-freezing.
Change management is one of the best practicing areas for many consulting firms today. These days, there are dozens of independent consultants engaged in planned change and are called as change agents. They manage change for their clients. The expertise that is required to manage the general process of change has led to the emergence of many change agents nowadays. |
