Change Management and Continuous Improvement are sometimes used interchangeably to describe transformational changes to a business or its way of working. However, these terms are focused on very different change strategies, and the method you choose will depend on how you want the changes to be made and how much of a cultural upheaval your organisation can tolerate. Often a combination of these two is the best approach.
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What is Change Management?
Change management is a structured approach that seeks to ensure that any changes made to a business, are implemented correctly and that the ongoing benefits of a particular change are achieved over time. Change management usually looks at the wider aspects of business transformation; the individuals and teams within a company and how they can migrate to a new way of doing things with little impact on their day-to-day activities.
It is also more focused on the big changes that occur within a business and those that are more likely to face resistance. Some examples include:
As organisational change management strategies typically look at the people within the organisation, you can expect most of the key steps of managing change to be focused on them. A typical change management strategy will cover the following points:
If change management is done well, then the impact on the people and business as whole will be very low, and it will take significantly less time to return to business as usual. Other benefits of a successful change management implementation include:
If a change management implementation is unsuccessful, then it is likely that your transformation plans will fall through and the proposed changes will not be implemented successfully, if at all. Other issues that may arise as a result of poor change management practices include:
Continuous improvement is an ongoing, long-term approach to improve processes, products and services. In contrast to change management, continuous improvement occurs gradually and aims to make small incremental changes over time. However it is important to note that continuous improvement projects can also become part of a larger change management initiative. Generally speaking, continuous improvement looks to change and improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs. As the majority of changes are small, there is often less resistance and take-up is greatly improved.
Some examples of how continuous improvement can be used include:
You can read more about this in the article: What is Continuous Improvement? A Simple Guide
For medium to large organisations or ones of any complexity, a great way to start Continuous Improvement is by process mapping. You can read more about this here: Process Mapping: Who does it and why.
Once captured, business processes must be shared with your whole organisation via a Business Process Management system. Just capturing and sharing your business processes encourages people to come up with ideas about how to improve them. In fact, when starting to process map it is often difficult to focus people on capturing what is currently done, as they immediately start to come up with good ideas on how to improve them.
Whether or not you take a process mapping approach to Continuous Improvement, improvement ideas must be captured - from all stakeholders and interested parties - in an improvement or change roadmap. This enables ideas to be group together by topic and prioritised according to your corporate goals. Then as part of business as usual the top priority improvement ideas are gradually and continually implemented.
There are many benefits of implementing continuous improvement in your organisation. Gaining an overview of all your business processes can be one, as is reducing costs and increasing efficiency but also:
There aren’t many limitations to implementing continuous improvement providing it is done properly and becomes part of the culture in your organisation. However, there are several factors that may lead to problems when getting your project off the ground, some examples include:
Of course all of these can be reduced or eliminated by supporting its implementation with a change management approach.
Which strategy you choose, will ultimately depend on the unique goals and objectives of your business, however Triaster's experience is that, adopting a continuous improvement approach and supporting its implementation through change management seems to be the most effective way to make improvements in your business.
Whichever way you plan to move forward, you will definitely need an Improvement Roadmap. Triaster's Ask The Crowd is a software tool that is designed to capture everyone's ideas and prioritisation views to enable you to build the best possible change roadmap that everyone can get behind. Sign up for a free 14 day trial now.
What is Continuous Improvement? A Simple Guide
Process Mapping: Who does it and why?
How to Build a Continuous Improvement Roadmap: a Practical Guide
The Complete Guide to Continuous Improvement in Business
This is an updated and refreshed version of an article originally written in 2017.