Implementing successful change in your business
Implementing successful change in your business
In any business large or small managing change can be one of the most difficult tasks. Change is important in allowing your business to move forward and become more successful. I've always said that if you continue doing something the same way you always have, then you will never improve. Change allows you to make improvements in your business, however if the change isn't managed correctly it can be very painful.
Here are some steps on how to make successful changes in your business:
1. Define what you want to achieve:
Work out the exact details around what you are wanting to achieve by making the change in your business, this will allow you to measure the success of the change.
The following table is a good example of the type of information you should collect:
Change required
Why
How
Time Frame
Importance (Scale 1-10 Important)
Increase the speed to invoice customers from 14 Days to 2 Days
This will increase our cashflow by customers receiving their invoice quicker and therefor paying us faster.
Collect information from our field staff quicker by using technology and ability to email invoices. Ie implement a new field service management software focusing on this aspect
3 weeks
9
What's good about this is it allows you to put specifics around the change and makes it very measurable. During the process of implementation you may get drawn into looking at other areas for change but by reviewing the table it will allow you to focus back on your core reason for change.
2. Small Steps
Often when people start thinking about change they start to think a lot about all the areas of their business that can be changed. It's very easy to list 20 tasks that need to be changed and then very quickly start to feel overwhelmed by the change and give up. When making changes try and break down the changes into small steps that are easy to manage and can be achieved in a matter of weeks rather than months. Creating project that require months of work to be done often means the project will become extremely complex and will also have a higher risk of failure.
Small steps will allow you to make progress and will allow you to achieve overall greater success.
3. Involve key people and provide vision from the top
Having your staff involved in change is important, but it's also important that change is driven from top down. You don't want to have change forced onto your staff, it's important you explain your vision for the change and the reasons why the change is occurring.
A good example of a poor way of handling change with your staff is by creating uncertainty..... A while a go I was at a client implementing Connect2Field. Initially they went through a tender process to implement a field service management software application (a monster project was created). They had listed a huge list of changes they wanted to implement, as part of the project the company was moving from a completely paper based system to an electronic based system. Their top level management had decided on the change yet they had very little discussion with their staff about the specifics. When we started the training with the staff who were actually going to be using the system I noticed there was some resistance from one of the staff members. When no one else was in the room she said to me 'look I'm very scared about this system as I can see how good it is and I'm scared that I won't have any more work to be done, then I wont have a job'. In one way this was a great complement to our software and how it helps run a business so well. It did however show that their management hadn't discussed the change with their staff and explained their vision and why they were implementing it.
There was some further discussion with the particular staff member, during which we explained that she was still going to be required by the company even with the new system and by implementing the new system it allowed her to focus on more important tasks. This would then allow the company to grow and provide better support to their customers.
A simple 15-30 minute meeting with staff prior to going down the path of implementing the system would have allowed for a far more successful process in making changes to their business. This would have allowed any questions or concerns to be answered and then allowed everyone to focus on making the change successfully.
4. Don't wait till it's perfect
This may sound strange but often business owners are perfectionists. It's actually better to implement a new change that solves 80% of your problems and work towards getting it to 100% rather than not implementing anything at all. It's better to implement a change that you can adjust and work with to see how the change actually works in the real world. Adjusting the change so it works better in the real world means you will be able to get it near-perfect. If you always wait for something to be perfect prior to implementing, you may find that once the change is in the real world it won't actually be perfect.
The old-school method of change management was to design a whole massive project, make sure everything is perfect, build massive documentation and then take 12 months to implement. This methodology is a thing of the past. Small steps are the way to go in making successful changes in your business in a matter of days or weeks rather than months.
Start making changes to your business today!
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