Customer Reviews

Managing the Change Process: A Field Book for Change Agents, Team Leaders, and Reengineering Managers

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A very useful book especially if you are a change agent within your corporation. In relatively short and sharp chapters, the three authors address key issues in managing change. The underlying theme that change is all about people comes out relatively clearly. Though the book is based on much of Coopers & Lybrand's approach to change management, the first six chapters are fairly generic. By learning from the Coopers & Lybrand's experiences , you can craft your appropriate change strategy for your particular situation and circumstances. Recommended reading for all those involved in managing change and transition at the workplace.

I wouldn't really call this a "field book," but it is certainly a good account of organization change management. It comes out of the mid-90s, so its orientation is toward the learning organization (Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization) and business process reengineering (Hammer and Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution (Collins Business Essentials)). An update would doubtless align itself behind Kaplan and Norton's The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action. If you have any background at all in strategic planning or workflow analysis, you will find the basic concepts familiar and usefully applied.

The core observations make sense:

* Change is an ongoing reality of the modern enterprise, and so is change management.

* Change management must involve both the technical side and the people side of the organization.

* Managing change starts with planning, but planning isn't sufficient, so don't get bogged down.

* The leaders of change are the leaders of the organization: top management. Of course, they must commit to the change, but, more importantly, they must show their commitment in their behavior. They must be the managers that they need to be if the change is to be successful, and they must actively involve themselves in selling the change to the troops.

* Change management must incorporate metrics, especially on the people side, so you can know if you're making progress.

Etc. There are lots of lists that can usefully be turned into checklists, and there is an appendix of excerpts from interviews with change leaders.

The negatives aren't really serious. The Coopers & Lybrand methodology is so general as to be either obvious or useless, depending on your point of view. C&L doesn't share its tools, but it does name them, so you should be able to find some that are functionally comparable.

In sum, this is a good starting point for building a change management function and/or understanding your role in the process.

An important contribution to a critical subject. Change management consulting often suffers from "hack" approaches. Whether change can in fact be managed is another issue.