Organizations go through numerous changes based on their future goals and objectives. Consequently there must be a mechanism to maintain the integrity and sustainability of these changes and avoid them rolling back to their past status. This process is called Change Management. It is a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organization’s goals, processes or technologies. The purpose of change management is to implement strategies for effecting change, controlling change and helping people to adapt to change. Such strategies include having a structured procedure for requesting a change, as well as mechanisms for responding to requests and following them up.
Change management can be used to manage many types of organizational change. The three most common types are:
Developmental change – Any organizational change that improves on previously established processes and procedures.
Transitional change – Change that moves an organization away from its current state to a new state in order to solve a problem, such as mergers and acquisitions and automation.
Transformational change – Change that radically and fundamentally alters the culture and operation of an organization. In transformational change, the end result may not be known. For example, a company may pursue entirely different products or markets.