What are the Implications and Barriers to Successful Change Implementation ?

Implementing change is the difficult task in any field because it involves many factors to consider. Anyone cannot easily implement the change without considering about some important aspects. There are always both implications and barriers to implement change successfully. In the complex and competitive modern world, organizations should be ready to adapt for changing environmental conditions by initiating changes continuously in order to remain profitable and competitive. Some important changes occurs while organization ready to undertake changes like acquisitions or mergers, implementing new technologies, downsizing, outsourcing, restructuring operations and introducing new programs like business process management or six sigma. The implications of changes involve maintaining or improving an organizational effectiveness. The effectiveness associated with the organization’s ability to adopt resources efficiently in order to achieve urgent goals and also embracing the requirement to changing situations to be capable to remain efficient over the long term.

Organizational change involves more than one components of the organizational system or the rearrangement of the entire system. It affects all sub-systems like strategy, people, work and other formal and informal structures and processes. When the implementation of change affects the larger part of the organization, it is considered to be strategic but it is limited to particular organizational component along with the aim of regaining or maintaining congruence. Hence, there is a possibility for many barriers to restrict the implementation of change. There is a requirement for the planned approach to avoid all the barriers. Planned approach involves a top down approach and refers the sequential process of planning phase, organizing phase and implementing change phase. Hence, organization can easily move from its current stat to the desired state of future in a less time. As the behavior of organizational elements is one of the barriers for change, planned changes help to change the behavior of the organizational elements such as processes, people and organizational culture. Hence, it leads to achieve the desired organizational outcomes. The barriers can be avoided by following the steps of planned approach of change such as communicating and developing a vision, planning, programming and adopting the best change practices as well as accessing top management determination.

The diagnosing of change is the best way to implement change in an organization without any barriers. Diagnosing the requirement for change in organizations leads the process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting data about group, individual and functioning of organization. There are a lot benefits related with conducting a diagnosis of organization before performing a change initiative. The process of diagnosis can inform the leadership about the perceptions and attitudes of employees regarding the change and also assist leadership to determine how change events can affect the organizational outcomes, serving as a guide to the leadership for planning actions which may be needed to address any problems in the implementation process of change. Diagnostic analysis not only involves collection of data before change implementation but also the identification of barriers within the organization which can facilitate or constrain the change implementation. Therefore, the process of implementing change is not the easiest thing to accomplish without diagnosis and planned approach. The organization should consider many important factors before the implementation of change because it has to diagnose about the barriers of the change what they would like to establish.

Hence, both the implications and the barriers of organizational change should be diagnosed carefully before implementing any changes in the organization.