Are You Ready for Change?

Braden Kelley is an innovation and change specialist, the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, an InnovationExcellence.com co-Founder, and is the creator of the Change Planning Toolkit™ and a book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (January 2016 release).

  Agile   Change Management  

In the first article in this series, How Agile Are Your Change Efforts?, we looked at some of the links between agile and change methodologies. In this article, we will investigate a different question: Are you and your organization ready for change?

Too often, organizations define the change effort they want to pursue without first identifying whether there are people, resources, legislation, etc. present that must be in place before the change effort can begin. We will explore the circumstances you may want to be aware of before beginning any change effort--and the areas to explore as potential prerequisites to the change program and its eventual success.

During the course of any change initiative, many different challenges will appear. The most successful change efforts will anticipate those challenges and have a plan for dealing with them. Part of that anticipation begins with identifying how ready the organization is for change and understanding what some of the top challenges are.

In a 2008 global CEO study conducted by IBM on the enterprise of the future, IBM identified the top challenges to successfully implementing strategic change as:

• Changing mindsets and attitudes (58%)
• Corporate culture (49%)
• Underestimation of complexity (35%)
• Shortage of resources (33%)
• Lack of higher management commitment (32%)
• Lack of change …

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