"The Hard Side of Change Management"
Harvard Business Review
October 2005, pp. 109-118
The "soft issues" of change management include culture, leadership, motivation, and communication. While these issues are important, the authors say that if organizations do not deal with the hard issues first, change programs will not work and the soft elements will lose their effectiveness.
The authors discuss four "hard" elements that the Boston Consulting Group first identified in a study completed in 1994. Since that time, the four elements have been used to predict the outcomes, and guide the implementation, of more than 1,000 change management initiatives. The authors claim that these four factors remain the best predictors of change outcomes:
- Project duration—This factor refers to the time to complete a short-life-span change program, or the time between reviews of milestones for longer-life-span programs. The research indicates that a long project that is reviewed frequently is more likely to succeed than a shorter project that is infrequently reviewed.
- Performance integrity—this factor refers to the creation of an implementation team that can be relied upon to execute change projects successfully. A key element here is the selection of appropriate team members.
- Commitment of senior executives and staff—Top management must frequently and enthusiastically show their support for change, both by word and action. Similarly, the support of the staff who are key implementers is also crucial.
- Additional effort that employees must make to cope with the change—The heaviness of current workloads should be assessed, and determinations should be made whether the change process will put employees on "overload." The ideal scenario is that no one's work load should increase more than 10%.
A framework for measuring each of these four factors is presented in the article.
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