Effective Change Management provides a structured and supportive path through the stages of change. It builds the acceptance and success of change by minimising denial and resistance, encouraging exploration, and accelerating commitment.

Proton's Business Impact & Change Management services provides a defined process to assess and manage the impact of change for people and organisations.

This process is designed to minimise disruption to the business and help staff accept and adjust to the change.

Our structured Communication and Training Programs are delivered by highly experienced and qualified Change Managers, combining specific industry knowledge with project management and human resource skills.

Background

Planning and managing change, both cultural and technological, is one of the most challenging elements of any project. Understanding the key areas of change management, and the associated traps and pitfalls others have encountered, is critical to achieving success.

Defining Change Management

When we ask someone to accept a new business process, technology, or job role, we're asking them to embrace the unknown; and anytime we are dealing with the unknown, we should expect resistance. The fact is, resistance to change is not a character flaw, but a normal, healthy, survival trait. So what looks like resistance to the change itself is really something different - it is resistance to the newness of the change. Change Management helps overcome the natural resistance to change by progressively and systematically removing the unknowns. By building familiarity with a change before it happens, the perceived threat can be reduced or removed. Individual and group energy that would otherwise be put into resisting change is redirected into adapting to the change.

The Problem

A recent survey of over 100 Fortune 500 companies identified the main factors affecting successful change. Overall, more than half of the respondents considered their company's key change effort to be a failure, while only one-third felt they had been successful in meeting the objectives of their change initiatives.
The main factors affecting the ability to change were:

• Resistance from employees, including top and middle level managers, to doing things in new ways.
• An organisational culture historically unaccustomed to change.
• Poor communication of the purpose and plan for change.
• Incomplete follow-through of the change initiative.
• Lack of management agreement on the business strategy or model.
• Insufficient skills to support the change.

These findings support the view that organisational change can be difficult to achieve, and that the greatest obstacles are usually within the organisation.