Change Management
Change Management
What is change management?
- Making change stick without resistance
- The key is people’s acceptance, not technology
- Uses Kotter’s 8 steps and ADKAR
Once change management comes in, the project plan itself looks different. Where it once listed only the development schedule and go-live date, there is now a separate line for 'who needs to be convinced of what, and when,' with a budget and an owner attached. Change management means adding a 'people' line item to the schedule. The moment you put on paper whom you will meet and what you will say in the three months before go-live, and which channel will take the complaints that surface afterward, a vague “stronger communication” becomes work you can track.
Where Kotter’s 8 steps cover the flow of the whole organization, ADKAR looks at the five gates each individual employee passes through. They are not competitors; they work on different axes. ADKAR is useful in practice because of its diagnostic power. Two people may both look like 'resistance,' but someone who does not know why the change is happening and someone who agrees it is needed but cannot work the new screen need opposite remedies. The first is solved with messaging, while the second needs training and a hands-on manual. One more point: change management is not an announcement or a training event. An announcement is done in a day, but change management is an ongoing effort that carries through the three to six months after launch when productivity dips.
The most common misconception in the field is thinking that one kickoff town hall and a two-hour e-learning module count as change management. Add to that the habit of treating resistance as an attitude problem and issuing warnings, and the opposition does not disappear; it goes underground. People appear to use the new system, but real decision-making still runs on personal spreadsheets, so you end up with two sets of books. The same happens when data-entry work is piled on without taking a single existing task off people’s plates. Your most conscientious employees burn out first. Once trust is broken, people will not even listen to the explanation for the next change.
Yeonmi SongSpecialist instructor and coach in relationship management, resilience, and self-leadership
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”There are several models, but the most widely used is the 8-step model that Harvard’s John Kotter set out in his 1996 book Leading Change. It lays out the sequence from creating a sense of urgency to anchoring the change in culture.
Let’s walk through a hypothetical case. Company A, a Korean auto parts manufacturer (380 employees, KRW 140 billion (≈ US$104,743,400) in annual revenue), set out to replace production management that had run on spreadsheets and handwritten logs for 20 years with an MES. The first attempt collapsed two months after launch with an on-site entry rate of 30%, and the production foremen, with an average tenure of 14 years, kept repeating, 'Who was this even built for?' The preparation period before the retry was five months.
- The head of production opened a session to hear why the first attempt failed. Only after 12 foremen poured out complaints like 'The input screen takes 12 clicks, and on paper it takes 3 seconds' was the screen design reopened.
- The head of Management Support put three shop-floor foremen on the MES task force as formal members and gave them a monthly allowance of KRW 200,000 (≈ US$150). That one move did a lot to break the perception that it was 'something the IT team is imposing.'
- They piloted it on just one line in Process 2 for six weeks. Once the time to complete the daily production report fell from 47 minutes to 11, the foremen started spreading the word to other lines on their own.
- A quality team manager compiled “this week’s 3 pain points” every Friday and posted the results by the following Wednesday. Of 61 items received over 8 weeks, 44 were actually implemented.
- Four months after the company-wide launch, the on-site entry rate rose to 94%. With the duplicate spreadsheet tracking by process gone, the three days it took to compile month-end closing data shrank to half a day.