Is Your Change Management Program Impacted by Change Saturation? Your Change Management program is in place and communications are going out regularly, but you find your associates disengaged, confused and very skeptical of the upcoming change. You talk regularly with your team and other associates, but you feel like you’re dealing with a disproportionate emotional reaction to each change-related communication that goes out. Do these situations sound familiar? If your Change Management initiative contains all the key components for success and you have been diligent with its implementation but still find the people within the organization unresponsive, you could be dealing with change saturation.

Introduction:

You’ve just been asked by your boss to develop and implement a productivity program to reduce waste and improve quality. Several of the executives are retrenching into a defensive posture: preserve cash, freeze discretionary spending, cut operating budgets X% across the board, accelerate early retirements, layoffs, and sell off non-core assets. Others are advocating more investment in R&D, rolling out new products / services, and even rethinking the business model. Your company’s livelihood is at stake. The expectations for you personally are even higher.

After 3 decades of Total Quality Management, Process Reengineering, Lean, Six Sigma and now Business Process Management, it is mind boggling to observe that only a few companies have an excellent process Governance in place and consistently manage their processes.

It is certainly valid to ask ourselves why we are not doing better and what can we do to remediate to the situation. The literature from the ABPMP BPM CBOK^TM to the different Gartner reports and our understanding of process ownership and governance has certainly improved tremendously over the last 5 years and yet we still count only a few companies that manage by process year after year.

After pondering the question for a while here are a few thoughts on the question and some suggestions on how to approach Governance and Ownership in a way that can lead to better results and a sustainable process culture.

There are few business professionals today who do not know what Business Process Management is or do not have, at least a general idea of what it’s about. The number of articles and papers being written about BPM has increased at a rapid pace over the past five years to the point one cannot open a business magazine or newsletter without some reference to the tools and technologies that are available to make your organization truly process-centric.