Every organization undergoes change, whether that’s changing physical location, changing technologies, or changing organizational roles.
Major organizational changes require that rank and file employees must each make their own individual changes, and this can be difficult. If individual employees don’t have the support they need to make the individual changes that contribute to organizational change, results can include wasted time and resources, resentful employees, and change that doesn’t deliver positive results.
Change management is the process of preparing for, executing, and supporting change before, during, and after it happens. It’s a great way to ensure nobody misses any key steps and that the change delivers the results you expect. Many aspects of change management can be assisted by automated workflows.
Plan Change
Suppose your business is moving to a new location. Careful planning is necessary to minimize upheaval. With the right workflow software, you can create change management workflows for tasks like selecting moving service providers, scheduling employees during the move itself, ensuring any required deposits are paid, and confirming that every employee has a workspace and necessary tools at your new location.
Such workflows can be designed to ensure no steps are missed by prohibiting completion of further steps until all prerequisite steps have been taken. They can also be used to keep the days leading up to moving day on schedule, and to send out periodic notifications keeping affected employees informed about progress.
Map Change
Mapping out change with workflows requires that you understand your current status with regard to the change, and that you have a clear vision of how the situation will be different once change has been completed. Maybe a current software suite you use is clunky and inadequate to the needs of your growing business, so you plan to replace it with something newer and more advanced.
Mapping out goals for after the change is a key step in change management, and workflows can help here too. If, for example, new software will first roll out to a single department, and then expand to other departments, you can create workflows scheduling the order of departmental adoption, with checklists department heads can complete once the new software is in place.
Mapping out change to the best of your ability helps affected employees know they are supported
while keeping the steps involved in change on track for efficient completion.
Manage Change
Workflow management and change management go hand-in-hand. During a major change, such as a reorganization of departments or teams, automated workflows can be designed to methodically manage each affected person’s old and new status. Suppose your business now has HR and payroll together in one department, but you plan to split payroll off into its own department.
Workflows can be created to track each affected employee so that their current role and their future role are clearly defined, and so that employees left behind understand exactly how their roles will change. You can also create workflows for moving employees whose workstations will change location. This can prevent confusion and miscommunication and help the new, separate departments get up and running more quickly.
Track Change
Tracking change, including successes, problems, and lessons learned can be tremendously beneficial for future change management scenarios. With the right workflow software, you can easily collect data on how long certain steps take, where problems arose, and which steps proceeded as planned. You can later use this data to create reports that help inform future change management initiatives. If your workflow software has powerful data collection and reporting capabilities, this can be done easily.
PerfectApps is workflow software that makes workflow management – including change management – straightforward and perfectly organized. No programming is required to create customized online forms and workflows, embed audit trails, and collect data for reporting. PerfectApps can be an outstanding change management partner in addition to its many other applications in streamlining and automating business processes. If you need inspiration and ideas, watch our demo video, or browse through our case studies. You’ll discover the many ways PerfectApps delivers better, faster, more accurate business processes across departments and across industries.
