Change management approach for enterprise transformation and improvement

Abstract

Enterprises, companies and organizations around the world strive to achieve competitive advantage by designing and implementing more advanced business and organizational architectures, streamlined and robust processes and structures, and effective and scalable management systems and practices. Industry, academia and management consulting companies have developed a variety of organizational models, change frameworks and transformation roadmaps to facilitate and to support business improvement activities and initiatives. The overall change management landscape, however, remains rather vague, overlapping and fragmented at the same time. To reduce this ambiguity and to be able to make a better-educated choice of models and frameworks to use, a close examination, classification, mapping and analysis of leading models and frameworks is conducted here. Common themes and distinct features are identified. An alternative high level organizational model is proposed. The coupled nature and duality of organizational models and change frameworks are identified and explored. Macro and meso levels of change management are considered and bridged via the classification of change management actions and interventions and the decomposition of change management planning and transformation design phases. To complement high level change management frameworks with applied tools, a change management projects scoring approach called "BLUE-over-RED" is proposed. In addition, an attempt to formulate a formal problem of organization transition trajectory optimization using the apparatus of operations research and graph theory is made.