Manavendra S. Gokhale
Sweny M. Sukumaran
About the Author
Emily Carr has been working as a Change Management consultant for over a decade. As a consultant, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies to develop and execute successful Change Management, communications, and training programs for large-scale business and IT projects. These programs have had global reach across the United States, Australia, India, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Emily is also the author of the popular Change Management blog, Practical Change Management .
I would like to thank my husband, Ben, for all of his support throughout the writing of this book.
About the Reviewers
Manavendra S. Gokhale is a management professional with 24 years' experience with 17 years at CEO level. He has headed companies across multiple verticals, and has strong leadership and team building capabilities. He has worked on MIS systems and Analytics, and evaluated people at various levels in companies across the hierarchy.
He is a visiting faculty member to various well known Business schools, and teaches various subjects across functions and general management. He has had exposure as a Corporate Consultant for eight years and has conducted multiple corporate workshops.
He has used IT extensively in his corporate activities coupled with strong networking skills due to working across verticals and engagements in India and other countries.
He defines progress as making things easier and enabling people to reach their milestones by helping them avoid the problems they face and help them learn by sharing experiences.
Brenda Kerton, MA Leadership, has over 25 years of experience in leadership, business, and information technology. Her strengths are strategic analysis, change leadership, and aligning business with IT. Her passion is the creation of business solutions that respect the people and their work, and truly achieves the benefit opportunities.
Her experience covers a range of the following areas:
- Leadership: Strategies and plans, goal setting, managing, directing, and coaching
- Communications: Public speaking, written research, facilitation, and internal communications
- Management of change: Training, coaching, and planning
- Building individual and team capability: Employee assessment and performance management, professional development planning, coaching and mentoring, and training and training development
- Process analysis and reengineering: Current and target state analysis, redesign plans, and process improvement
- Project management: Product implementation projects, business process change projects, and IT application projects
- Consulting: From large multi-month engagements to small half-day assignments to ongoing phone coaching and support
She is the Principal Consultant and owner of Capability Insights Consulting www.capabilityinsights.com.
Preface
Think about the projects your company has implemented over the years. How many of them were successful? How many of them failed? Now, think about one of the projects that failed. Take a minute to write down the three main reasons it failed:
- ________________________________________________________________
- ________________________________________________________________
- ________________________________________________________________
If your company is like most companies, the reasons you wrote down have little to nothing to do with technology. They concern people. People didn't like the new technology. People weren't trained properly on the change. People hadn't received adequate communications and didn't understand the change. People had been through so many failed change projects in the past that they knew if they just waited long enough, this one would fail too, and they could go back to the old way of doing things.
Sound familiar?
Project teams rarely forget to work on the technology, but they often forget to work with the people, and no matter how amazing your new technology is, it's useless unless people use it efficiently.
This book will help you focus on people. It will walk you step by step through the main aspects of Change Management, so that by the time your new technology is ready, your people are ready, too.
How to use this book
This is not a theoretical book. It is a practical book that will prepare you to manage change in your organization. Throughout the book, as I explain each new concept, there will be an activity for you to complete that will allow you to put that new idea into action.
For many of the exercises, I will provide a sample solution. This will give you one possible way to complete the exercise, but it is not the definitive answer. Your answer will be unique to your project and organization. As you come back to this book for different projects, you are likely to find that the answers you come up with differ based on the unique characteristics of the change you are implementing.
If you are currently working on a project, I strongly encourage you to use your project for the activities. Think about how to apply the activities to your organization, and use your real-life situation to fill in the templates. By the end of the book, you will have the beginning of a Change Management plan that will prepare you to help the people in your organization to successfully adopt the change you are implementing.
If you don't have a project that you are working on, you can use the case study that I have included in this