Change management is an approach to shifting or transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from their current state to a desired future state. It is an organizational process aimed at helping stakeholders accept and embrace change in their business environment. In some project management contexts, change management refers to a project management process wherein changes to a project are formally introduced and approved.
Kotter defines change management as the utilization of basic structures and tools to control any organizational change effort. Change management's goal is to maximize organizational benefit, minimize impacts on workers, and avoid distractions. There are different types of change an can organization face.
Business Process Re-Engineering
Business process re-engineering (BPR) is a business management strategy first pioneered in the early 1990s that focuses on the analysis and design of workflows and processes within an organization. BPR aims to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. In the mid-1990s, as many as 60% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to have either initiated re-engineering efforts or begun planning for it.
BPR helps companies radically restructure their organizations by focusing on their business processes from the ground up. A business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome. Re-engineering emphasizes a holistic focus on business objectives and how processes relate to them, encouraging full-scale recreation of processes rather than iterative optimization of sub-processes.
Business process re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, and business process change management.
Incremental Change
Incremental change is a method of introducing many small, gradual (and often unplanned) changes to a project instead of a few large, rapid (and extensively planned) changes. Wikipedia illustrates the concept by building an encyclopedia bit by bit. Another good example of incremental change is a manufacturing company making hundreds of small components that go into a larger product, like a car. Improving the manufacturing process of each of these integral components one at a time to cut costs and improve process efficiency overall is incremental change.
Technological Change
Technological change (TC) describes the overall process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of technology or processes. The term is synonymous with technological development, technological achievement, and technological progress. In essence, TC is the invention of a technology (or a process), the continuous process of improving a technology (which often makes it cheaper), and its diffusion throughout industry or society. In short, technological change is based on both better and more technology integrated into the framework of existing operational processes.