Organizational Change Management is accused of being show stoppers

Organizational Change Management (OCM) is not an "order taking" service for peer service group to haul around as and when and how they like!

The power of the OCM team lies in where the team is housed within an organization. If the OCM team is housed in any of the CXO offices, you have a powerful system to operate from. But if you are housed within a function team, your area of operations is limited to within the group.

Being in a CXO team has its own benefits and challenges.

Benefits are: You have the power to decide and recommend if a proposed change is good for end user and have a roll out go-live or be put "On hold". You are also consulted before a change (like application or services) are bought from vendors. You also enjoy the benefit of credibility if housed in a CXO office. Peers and change takers will go by your word about change preparedness.

Challenges: You are seen to yield more power when there raise a conflict of interest between change proposer and your team. This is the only challenge met by the team when housed within a CXO team.

When do peers see OCM team as show stoppers?

... When a change is pushed back or not rolled out in the interest of end users. Let me cite an example here.

Your organization purchases a Titanic and approaches the OCM team for roll out. Your business wants the passengers (users) to board the ship ASAP and start sailing full steam. All this is in alignment to the business reason and goal of purchasing the ship.

While gathering information to ensure a smooth roll out and adoption by end users, you realize that the Titanic is being pushed into a lake size water body and not the ocean because you don’t have one!

A sensible OCM team will push back the roll out saying, even if the ship is the Titanic; we need an ocean and not a lake so that passengers get to SAIL and not get stuck. Therefore even the boarding of end users need not be initiated and the Titanic cannot be used.

This is going to infuriate the buyers of Titanic and they are sure to call OCM team as show stoppers. Completely missing the point that the USD 500,000was spend on buying something which end users cannot use due to lack of or weak infrastructure.

The work around is to add on to the infrastructure but that’s where the RoI comes and goes into negative due to additional expenditure to roll out the change.

What Team OCM did for the IS team was to ensure they did not roll out a partially working, available product for their end users thus saving grace and endless escalation calls for poor service.

What gets highlighted is that Team OCM stopped change! (Even though it was done in the interest of end users).

I have experienced many such situations where asking right questions in the interest of end users has saved my team from rolling out weak changes. Now i use this experience for predictive change management approach within my organization.