Navigating the World of Change Management Policies
Published: 2023-11-17 16:01:49

If anything is certain in the world of business, it’s that things change faster than people can keep up with. Especially in our digital world, the rate of change that we are seeing far surpasses anything from previous decades. One only needs to look at the [high rate of cloud adoption over the past few years](https://www.cloudworldwideservices.com/en/cloud-adoption-statistics-cloud-future/) to quantify just how quickly organizations are embracing emerging technologies.

Yet, wanting to adapt to new technologies or new opportunities isn’t as simple as it may initially seem. On the contrary, change is a hugely complex problem that can require months of planning, communication, training, and implementation strategies to achieve. In order to change well, businesses need to have a comprehensive understanding of change management.

In this article, we’ll dive into the world of change management, demonstrating exactly why businesses that are flexible and ready for change will thrive by using these management frameworks.

Let’s dive right in.

## What is change management?

Change management addresses the process of preparing for a large-scale shift or change into a new environment. This process typically includes a range of planning, organization, and implementation strategies that ensure a business that moves through a change adapts effectively.

Most companies think of change management as a framework that facilitates an easy transition. Its processes cover far more than just mapping out how a business will change and what it will move to. Change management even includes adapting employees to a new system and helping to bring everyone up to speed with how to integrate new technologies into their workflows and thrive.

There are five conventional stages to cloud management, each defined by the processes that occur within them:

- **Development and Planning** – The first step on the road to making any major change in a company is planning out the change and identifying exactly why it would be beneficial. A common change over recent years is the mass movement to cloud providers and technologies. Businesses will first develop a clear plan that includes the objectives of the change, the strategies for bringing it about, and how they will inform the rest of the company.

- **Collaboration and Communication** – Of course, a business cannot undergo change without letting all involved parties know what they’re planning. First of all, businesses will communicate their change plan to stakeholders. Once the change is greenlit by all necessary parties, the organization will then create documents to share with all employees. These documents will express what the change is, why it is occurring, and what the company hopes to gain from it.

- **Initial Training and Scope Development** – Just notifying all involved parties is often not enough to guarantee a smooth change. Companies will also have to explain to employees how they can prepare for this change. Most organizations, especially when enacting a change that will impact the underlying infrastructure of a business, as is the case with a cloud transition, will launch training programs for their staff. These modules will teach everyone about how to use new systems, explain new technologies, and prepare people for the change. 

- **Implementation** – Once the initial stages of training have concluded, it’s time to actually start the process of implementing the new systems. Depending on the change, this might involve the mass movement of data, the configuration of new systems, or the integration of new central tools. For example, one of the most common recent changes that require change management is transferring to a [cloud data warehouse](https://www.firebolt.io/the-cloud-data-warehousing-guide). In that circumstance, the first instance, a mass movement of data and resources, would be part of the implementation process.

- **Review** – After the central change has occurred and a business has moved forward with its plan, there should be a brief final stage to review the process. This review has two main goals: to assess the efficiency of the change and to determine whether the change had its intended effect. This short evaluation will help businesses to plan for the future, identify any goals they still need to work toward and allow employees to give feedback on the process.

Depending on the complexity of the transformation that a business undergoes, these five stages could take anywhere from a few weeks to upwards of a year. Often, the scale of a business is directly proportional to the time it takes to make significant changes. With multi-national organizations, the scope of even a small change is much more difficult to manage than when working with a smaller business.

## Why is change management vital for businesses?

Considering the current rate of change in the wider technology sector, with new technologies emerging seemingly each month that promise to change the face of business, it’s no wonder that organizations in our current era are obsessed with managing change.

If change is a simple fact of life, then businesses that are not ready to adapt will fall behind. Change management provides numerous benefits to companies that understand and employ its frameworks:

- **Faster development** – When a new opportunity arises, businesses that understand change management can rapidly adapt and pounce on it. If you want to stay at the head of the pack, you need to change faster than the rest.

- **Employee skills** – investing in change management often leads to an increase in employee learning, as your workforce braces for new technology and learns how to manage it.

- **Minimize disruption** – When done incorrectly, change can leave a business without the ability to function correctly during the transition process. Planning ahead with change management neutralizes this worry and catalyzes rapid development.

Change management has become one of the most important skills for a business to harness over the past decade due to the frequency with which it must be employed. If organizations have to adapt every few years or each year to a new technological shift, then change management enables them to do so without falling behind or far surpassing their transformation budgets. 

## Final Thoughts


Businesses are always changing. Without a doubt, the ability to stay agile and flexible in future plans allows organizations to flourish. The very nature of a business implores that it remains willing to change. By understanding the change management process to a higher degree, business leaders will be able to steer their company effectively toward positive future plans.

While cloud transformation is still the leading change that businesses are making, there could well be new technologies that shift the balance of future operations strategy. Even in 2023, the proliferation of AI caused a wave of change across several sectors, a reactive change that we can expect to occur repeatedly over the next 10 years.