Strategic Human Resources Management

Athrú Consultancy has many years of experience and success in the leadership and support of change management initiatives and brings this wealth of experience and understanding to client change management projects.

Organisational change is driven by a number of factors including: 

• increasing globalisation
• changes in strategic direction
• technological changes
• competitive pressures
• shorter product life cycles
• customer pressure in terms of more sophisticated expectations
• legislative and regulatory requirements

What is common to all of these is the continuous requirement for the organisation or business to survive and grow.

Research indicates that organisations are undergoing major change approximately once every three years, whilst smaller changes are occurring on an almost continual basis. There are no signs that this pace of change will slow down indeed the widely held view is that it will continue to accelerate.  Within this context it is imperative that organisational leaders and managers have the ability to introduce and manage change so as to ensure that organisational objectives continue to be met.  It is also true that  effective leaders and managers have a core understanding that delivering successful and sustainable change means that they must ensure that they gain the commitment of their people at the start, during and after implementation of any major change initiative.
 
For these reasons, it is critical that the way change is managed is carefully considered by organisations. Whilst each change situation will be unique, there remain a number of common themes that will help ensure that the change process stands the greatest chance of success.
In order to deliver on their objectives leaders of change must understand a number of key fundamentals of the change process including

• The ability to clearly articulate the need for change in a manner that can be identified with by all those affected
• The need to gain commitment from all the key stakeholders
• Understanding the barriers to change and where these can arise and how they can be minimised
• Identifying those levers that will assist them with the change process
• Understanding the capacity in the organisation for change in terms of capability, skills and experience
• The need to put in place the organisation resources to deliver on the change
• Understanding how change impacts on both individuals and groups (both internal and external to the organisation) at the various stages in the process  

Key to the success of any change process are robust Project and Programme management disciplines. Failure to put these in place can lead to slippages in timings, failure to achieve the desired outcomes, and in embedding and sustaining the change.

Change Model

The following model sets out to provide an overview of the dynamics and inter-relationships within the overall change process.

The key aim of those charged with delivering effective change is to ensure that those aspects of the change process constituting the "Numerator" are maximised while any factors that contribute towards the “Denominator” are minimised.

It should be noted that Numerator is "multiplicative" in nature indicating that a weakness in any one of the three variables will severely reduce the probability of change being delivered successfully.

The actual shape or construction of the above factors will depend to a very significant extent on the actual organisation and the environment in which it finds itself. However some high level definitions can be thought of in terms of:

 Felt Need / Discontent with Current Status / Change Driver can take the shape of:

• Operating Environment
  • Competition
  • Replacement by New Product or Service
• New Business Relationships (Mergers, Acquisitions, Partnerships etc)
• Technological Change
• New Leader
• Pressure from
  • "owners"
  • Political establishment
  • Public
• Particular challenge in established successful organisations 

Future Vision / New State can take the shape of:

• Stretching but Plausible  
• Clearly Articulated
• Passionately Communicated
• Ownership engendered

Change Capability can take the shape of:

• Skills
• Experience
• Structures
• Resources
• Technology

Resistance to Change can take the shape of:

• Organisation culture and Form
  • Machine & Professionalised organisations may prove the most resistant
  • Innovative organisations more are agile and thus more amenable to change
• Individuals
• Unions
• Managers
• "Owners"

Athrú Consultancy is thus of the clear view that significant and ongoing attention paid to all of the above factors provides a robust Risk Mitigation strategy to ensure to successful implementation of the desired change.