Lessons Learned System SP2

REASON ® Change Management

Change is the only constant Many of us will agree that if we were presented one morning with an organization that was perfect in all respects, before the end of the day some internal changes will have already begun to form that may threaten to erode the quality of our operations some time in the future. Of course it is also true that if we had equal visibility of the external world, we would expect to note relevant external changes as well. Most of those external changes would be beyond the power of the organization to control, so any need for response would necessarily in that case generate the need for the organization itself to change in order to anticipate and compensate for the external changes. However, internal changes would deal specifically with issues and systems over which the organization has considerable control. Responding to internal changes would call for dealing with only the design of organizational controls.

The line between internal changes and external changes often serves as a boundary for traditional change management thinking and activities. The line also serves to define the quality of available data resources upon which change management principles can be applied.

Managing Internal Change

Although significant resources of internal data concerning counter-quality exist within most organizations, their value and relevance are sometimes not perceived and understood. It is the manner in which an organization perceives internal changes that dramatically dictates how it prepares itself to deal with internal changes, and how it responds to those changes. If the organization relies upon crises and trauma for its definitions of internal changes, and its triggers for response, then the activity of problem solving is seen by that organization only as the seat of immediate solutions. However, when the organization instead perceives internal changes as a strategic opportunity to maintain and foster quality of operations, its focus shifts strongly to the internal indicators of developing and on-going change, so that anticipation, assessment and response produce a system for managing change. From this perspective, the problem solving phase of the process is but one important step in a larger system that seeks to early gather appropriate data, to measure, chart and trend the data, and to develop organizational responses that both resolve current issues and produce sustaining control as well.

REASON sets in a complete data system that integrates the key elements and activities that are necessary to implement an effective internal change management capability. With a contemporary change management perspective, the long-term solution becomes one of setting in the means to provide accurate and complete visibility of developing internal changes one that will anticipate, detect and chart trends at an early point, and one that will quantify, to measure and compare causal systems associated with risk within the environment. Finally, the system must communicate information on problems and solutions quickly across all disciplines and lines within the organization. REASON accomplishes all of these requirements by providing an objective and repeatable computerized process for discovering systemic causes of problems, ordering the resulting data into a model that supports an objective quantification standard, linking the systemic causes to policies, strategies and goals, and integrating these functions into a computerized data system with advanced situational searching utilities. REASON is a uniquely advanced data system that provides you with the tools and capabilities to make the easy transition to expanded problem solving and deployment of a new generation change management data system. With REASON, you will gain advanced capabilities to address all of your immediate problems, and to put into place a REASON firewall that will shield you from unmanaged change in the future.

Internalizing Exterior Changes

REASON users are able to bring into the control influence of their organizations several sources of exterior changes that have in the past traditionally produced negative impacts upon their organizations. The key to this new source of operations improvement opportunity is to form REASON Lessons Learned Alliances with vendors, service providers and customers to solve and share solutions to mutual problems. This networking approach provides a problem solving and lessons learned technology that is shared in common. When a problem occurs that impacts both the organization and one of its vendors or customers, REASON is used by the appropriate Alliance member to pinpoint all of the control points for improvement and the solution options. The data flows automatically into the REASON Lessons Learned Alliance System to which all members have access. In this way, each member when experiencing a problem contributes to the knowledge of the membership. Members submit to the system a business data profile of the issues and processes about which they are concerned and interested. Your REASON Alliance Lessons Learned System constantly monitors the incoming data from all of the members, searching for matches between case data factors to the data profiles. When a match is found, an immediate alert is sent to the appropriate members providing a brief abstract of the problem. In moments, Alliance members can be accessing vital knowledge that they can apply to head of developing problems in their businesses. In effect the organization and all of its vendor/client Alliance members are able to internalize changes over which they previously had no control, and in so doing gain the benefit of the composite knowledge provided by all members.

Managing External Change

There are many sources of data to support an external change management activity: monitoring markets, environmental shifts, developing technologies, the activities of our competitors, political developments, economic trends, customer tastes and fads. All can play a role in the structure of external change management activity, depending upon the purpose, product and strategy of the organization. In such programs, the goals are: 1) to recognize changes that threaten to impact negatively the organizations goals, and 2) to perceive emerging opportunities for success as well. Change when discussed only in this context is the early response to external threat and opportunity. This external source of operations improvement information, when combined with REASON internal data and the benefits of internalizing vendor/client information, provides your organization with unprecedented capabilities to implement a modern change management initiative.

Conclusion

A contemporary view of change management must include both external and internal change as its targets. When dealing with changes, the focus and methods of monitoring, establishing early indicators, detecting and recording incidence of relevant change, analyzing trends, assessing internal need for change, and implementing change are all activities that require a stable source of reliable data. Now, to supplement the traditional sources of external data, a rich source of data relating to the internal changes that are associated with operations counter-quality is available through deployment of the REASON System.

For details on how easy it can be to deploy this new technology, please call us at (903) 236 9973.