Change is essential in facing today’s business challenges, and it will likely become even more so over time, so let’s take a fresh look at it. Perhaps the root cause for transformation failure isn’t in what many call Change Management, but rather in inadequate business process methodology.
Business Process Management (BPM) is the science of designing and improving business processes; Change Management (CM) is the science of helping people transition from Current State to Future State business processes with minimum disruption and uncertainty, and it’s where the blame is generally placed for the 70% failure rate of transformation initiatives.
The definitions of BPM and CM imply significant overlap between the two domains; the similarity is compelling enough to explore what the real differences are, if any. In other words, when we do BPM correctly, shouldn’t this address most, if not all of the CM requirements, and significantly improve the success rate of our transformation efforts?
World-class business process design focuses on fulfilling business requirements driven by business metrics, and defines business requirements as behaviors required by the business (rather than focusing on feature/function). So, presenting detailed Current State and Future State Business processes in this context, as behaviors, should naturally convey the change that is expected of our people in the transition, taking all the mystery out of it and facilitating process adoption for everyone involved. So, if we did this well, engaging everyone in understanding current and future state behaviors, explaining the differences between them at a detailed level and providing a value-based justification for the transition, what kind of change is left to manage?
Certainly, in addition to the actual business processes changing, there might be systems, applications and technical infrastructures that are changing; in fact, the need for system improvements often drives the need for process change. Yet documenting these tool and system related changes, and how user workflows leverage them in Future State processes, is inherent in any thoughtful process design. If we’re doing BPD as we ought, we’re covered here.
There’s also a need for proper user training in Future State processes and workflows, and for engaging subject matter experts and relevant business roles in shaping, defining, and ironing out Future state process details, but best practice BPM methodology takes this into account as well.
What else is left for CM when we’re following best practice BPM? Perhaps the concept of CM as a separate domain has arisen because we’ve not been thorough and thoughtful in our business process design. And perhaps it continues to be a problem because we aren’t thinking about change the way we should, as an inherent aspect of BPM. Addressing transformation failure as a process gap and employing world-class BPM methodology to resolve it is an insight that can drive success.