Managing Changes: Are you right brained or left brained?
Posted by Aswin Kumar
Here is another one on Change Management from me. I have started feeling harder for the word 'End-to-End' and its time now that I speak up and share!
Normally, in a decent size organization with sound service management processes, we find that Change Management indulges in putting effective Change controls in place. The day for a typical Change Management process associate passes in reviewing Changes and running through the Change advisory meetings. The implementation teams work their ways to assure that the Changes pass the success criteria and are accepted by the sponsors after implementation. In this whole chicken and egg game, I feel that the piece before the Change planning and after implementation is generally weak or completely ignored.Some of the questions we might ask ourselves are (and these are also FAQs thrown up by the CxOs to their Senior Management at the time of rolling out transformational Changes):
a. Did we define the value that will be obtained by doing a Change?
b. How will we make sure that we are able to obtain information on the value that is gathered over time post implementation?
c. How confident we are to claim that the end-users will be able to accept the Change as part of their ways of working?
d. Have we thoroughly ensured that the communications and trainings have started trickling down on time, assuming there is a global rollout of the Changes with multi-lingual end-users and multiple time-zones?
e. How do we ensure Sustainability of transformational Changes? Can we really sustain the momentum of Changes in a spiral moving towards the end goal?
We can go on with an unending list but let’s become solution focused now.
Hey then, where is THE solution?Is the Solution available with the people having dominant left brain or the right brain?
Is the Solution embedded in the good practices or knowledge bases or is it preached by the best practices and industry frameworks/standards such as ITIL, PMI, PRINCE2, CobiT, TOGAF, ISC(2), ISO, CMMI etc?Unfortunately, there is no alloy that is melted till date that contains all the required metals to resist all the 'Organizational' temperatures, stress/strain, viscosity, friction etc. But, here is a silver lining to this...
The solution lies in developing a unique Integrated Change methodology that combines the strengths of the left brain (logical thinking side) and the right brain (Organizational behaviour/values) to ensure various delivery units (aka schools of thoughts) namely, Portfolio Management, Process Governance, Human Resources & Learning, Change Management (more from the IT perspective), Program Management office, Value Realization, Quality Management and Implementation teams including Service Providers work in tandem to meet the goals. I might have missed some names but the essence of this methodology lies in integrating all the objectives and deliverables of various sub-units of the Enterprise and channelize into one way of End-to-End Change management.So what are those key elements towards building this unique methodology? I would start sharing experiences on the way out towards building, refining and rolling out this methodology in my next series of blogs.
Till then, happy reading and do drop me your valuable feedback comments/questions!Incase, you are wondering which portion of your brain is the dominant one then take this printable test 
