Introduction to change management - Essay Example

Introduction to Change Management Change is the process through which the business patterns and trends deviate from the norm and take another path, for instance the clients’ demand may change from certain specification inherent in a product to wanting a similar product but with different specifications. The process of change is key in driving creativity and innovations of a business and varies with the demands that an environment a business is operating requires, change will be key to new ways that make the interactions in an environment easier and better.

Change in an organisation can take various forms , some of these forms that the change take include: tuning type of change that involve those changes that increase the efficiency of an organisation and reduce operational costs, they include activities like improving policies, improving procedures and methods, introducing of new technologies, improving processes aimed at cost reduction among others. Another form of change is the recreational change that entail transformation of a whole organisation through changing its core elements simultaneously, this gives an organisation a new look and leads to readjusting of the goals that had been set in the organisation (Reiss, 2012) p28).

The third type of change is the reorientation where an organisation changes its direction of operation or business by supplying the market with new products or diversifying its business activities. The fourth type of change that can be analysed is the adaptation, which entails an organization continuing with its line of operation where there is improvement in the organisation that increases efficiency. Other types of change that exist include the continuous change where there is gradual change in an organisation that can lead to transformation of the organisation and the discontinuous change where changes happen at once Several factors that affect change in the life of an organisation; these factors can be divided into external factors that are beyond an organisation’s control and internal factors, which occur within the organisation.

The external factors that affect change in an organisation include technology; when technology changes, organisations have to adopt the new technologies otherwise they become less competitive since the old technologies become less cost effective. Change in legal and political environment also affects an organisation to change, for instance change of the laws or leadership may come with a new way of doing things that may force the organisation to change (Stare, 2011 p159). The market conditions like the behaviour of other firms or that of the buyers may change, this requires a firm to change its ways of operation in order to remain competitive in the market.

Social changes such as the way people’s preferences change may force an organisation to change in order to meet the needs and demands of its clients. Diagnosing the need for organisational change is dependent on whether the change is external or internal, there are various models that can be used to diagnose the need for change in an organisation that include; total and component model that looks at the specific areas in an organisation to detect where the changes should apply. Open system theory that operates on the premise that a change in one part of an organisation can cause changes to other parts.

Others are contingency theory that looks at how the various processes and departments within an organisation are related and the Korter’s theory look at the relationship s between the environment that the organisation operates within and how it affects the various organisation processes (Colovic, 2012 p09). Implementation of change depends on the factors that cause the change and the parts of the department that is affected by those changes; implementation of change is carried through several steps.

They include unfreezing which involves identifying and stopping the factors that cause the organisation not to change, changing the areas that maintained the status quo and then refreezing the areas of the business that have been adjusted to allow for growth. Nokia, which had for a long time been the seller of the highest number of mobile phones in the world is facing serious threat from its rival with its revenues declining, the struggles of the Nokia mobile manufacturing company has coincided with the increased uptake of smart phones in the world.

One of the contributing factors to the decline of Nokia is its lack of innovation in developing new products and the entrance of the android operating system for smart phones in the market. This has forced Nokia to collaborate with Microsoft to help in boosting its revenue and try to penetrate the North American and other developed mobile markets that has a small percentage uptake of Nokia mobile phones. References Colovic, G. (2012). Strategic management. 1-13. Reiss, M. (2012). Change management: a balanced and blended approach.

Norderstedt. Stare, A. (2011). Reducing negative impact of project changes with risk and change management. Mibes Transactions. 5(12). p151-165. Retrieved July 3 2013