Readiness To Change For Quality And Strategic Process Improvement: An Analysis

Background

Discuss about the Readiness to Change for Quality and Strategic Process Improvement.

Readiness to change an organization had been defined as a multi standard construct that indicated the collective commitment of the members of the organization to undergo changes. It had been considered as a function of variables depending on the importance given by the members and how cordially they had appraised the primary determinants of the implementation means, like the resource availability, task demands and the situational factors (Madsen, John & Miller, 2014).

Various strategies had been recommended by experts to create the priority of establishing the change in an organization, unlike the readiness to change individually. The organizational one had not been much in debate for pervasive empirical study or theoretical developments, with limited scientific basis, that were needed to be unfolded (Vakola, 2014).

In the following report the concept had been discussed, critically analyzed with its scope and impacts of the improvement of the method including professional and personal experiences reviewing relevant books and journals.

The readiness to change by the change management process was the continuance of activities or steps that were followed by project leaders and management teams such that the projects catch up its desired outcomes and individual transitions. It was important to measure the performances of the members and find out the levels and for that reason strategies for change could be imposed to detect the effective problems early (Bamford & Forrester, 2010). The following elements had been determined for a successful change according to “Prosci’s 3-Phase Process”-

1. Preparing for change, where the change management study was defined, preparation for the change in team and the sponsorship model was described. (Narciso & Allison, 2014)
2. Managing change, where the changes in plans were developed with implementing and taking actions for the plans.
3. Reinforcing change, where the feedbacks were collected and analyzed, the manage resistance and gaps were diagnosed and celebration of success and implementation of the corrective actions had been done (Abdulkadhim et al., 2015).

Like any other methodology and disciplines, establishing of the scope for the readiness to change was also important. Distinctions were needed to differentiate what activities fall in the change management and what went according with the readiness to change (Sanchez & Blanco, 2014).

The problem that aroused for the readiness to change from the side of the small and medium size enterprises or the SME, were that they their properties were not mutually exclusive and indicated self reinforcing driving systems that had restricted their capability to get changed by some factors. The factors were concentrating mostly on the strong aspects to change, supplied by control and command management style, neglecting the proactive approach and choosing the reactive ones (Ates & Bititci, 2011).

The capability to integrate resources from productions with restricted buffers, whose properties had been efficiently changed by blocking, was also a crucial extension. By developing the speculative optimization models guidance was provided where to give effort on direct improvements for a particular state of system parameters. This was done as the timing and amount of development had been obtained in uncertainty. Lastly, different realistic models for improvement incorporated, had allowed the lot sizes to get reduced (Godinho Filho & Uzsoy, 2014).

Establishing of Scope and its Impacts

Going with the “Prosci’s taxonomy for the scoping of readiness to change,” the scopes along with its impacts and examples had been like the following:

1. Identifying the need for change- It had helped to recognize the external or internal stimulus leading to a change requirement that like the strategic planning, customer inputs, financial results, internal performance, regulatory changes, competitive threats and new business opportunities.
2. Development and design of solutions- It left its impact make a solution needed to develop the overall performance based on identification like offering of new service and process design (Kumar & Schmitz, 2011).
3. Management of projects- It had helped in managing the budget, resources, scopes of technical design, tasks and implementation like the reporting of project, tracking and schedule development, planning of project and project oversight.
4. Change management- It had encouraged the employees quickly, proficiently and totally make the changes needed in their every-day tasks like performance measurement, readiness assessments and resistance management (Kerzner, 2013).

The outcomes of “readiness for developing business development through continuous process improvement” under the light of process improvement, were the most trivially theorized and studied aspect, in which the “social cognitive theory” had suggested that when the readiness became highest, the members had been more likely to impose changes like practices, procedures and policies (Vakola, 2014). The process improvement, if asked to evaluate according to professional and personal experiences the instruments best fitting the structure of readiness to change could be like –

1. According to Dean Anderson and Linda Acherman Anderson, two professionals on organizational change having the experience of over thirty years had suggested successful models that had been very much different from the previous fundamental models. They had considered the change process not to be a linear one. It was because of the fact that the individuals did not follow a straight line while implementing, maintaining and understanding changes (Tudor, 2014).
2. Let the example of tourism industry be taken. According to Joseph Lema, assistant professor of hospitality management program, having more than ten years of experience in the casino and hotel industry, the competitiveness of the tourism organizations had been the outcome of the skills and capability of the employees to quickly adjust the change. As a result of this the responsibility to perform had highly shifted toward the self directedness (Torres et al., 2015).
3. Another model from professional experience was suggested by John Kotter on 1995, a very influential identity from this field. His model was the very first one to focus the vitality of leadership in implementation of a process improvement successfully. It not only thought out reference for every model to be subsequently developed, but also for the changes of leader, professional or manager (Kotter, 2013).
4. Warren Bennis,a distinguished professor on business administration, had claimed on fashion industry that the changes might be introduced keeping the employees aware, because, if the changes were imposed slowly, it might had gone unnoticed or the company might become used to, to the gradual change. In the other case, when the changes were so gradual that the people could not realize it, they continued to behave in the previous way (Bennis, 2013).

Conclusion:

The report had discussed about the outcomes developing a theoretical connection between the implementation of research and theory and readiness for change of an organization. It had gone through the determinate that had illuminated the basis of several strategies but it might not be necessary to analyze theoretically, how the planning worked. The theories explored had gone through focusing on the distinction between the desired and present levels of performance, arising disapproval and many other factors, or in other words, by improving the degrees up to which the members acquire changes required worthwhile or important. Finally it should be reminded, that the way of thinking might had been best suited where behavior changes occurred coordinating and collectively not only for the organizational change but also for the changes to create anticipated advantages.

References:

Abdulkadhim, H., Bahari, M., Bakri, A., & Ismail, W. (2015). A Research Framework Of Electronic Document Management Systems (Edms) Implementation Process In Government. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology, 81(3), 420.

Ates, A., & Bititci, U. (2011). Change process: a key enabler for building resilient SMEs. International Journal of Production Research, 49(18), 5601-5618.

Bamford, D., & Forrester, P. (2010). Essential guide to operations management: concepts and case notes. John Wiley & Sons.

Bennis, W. (2013). Leadership in a digital world: embracing transparency and adaptive capacity. Mis Quarterly, 37(2), 635-636.

Godinho Filho, M., & Uzsoy, R. (2014). Assessing the impact of alternative continuous improvement programmes in a flow shop using system dynamics. International Journal of Production Research, 52(10), 3014-3031.

Kerzner, H. (2013). Project management: a systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley & Sons.

Kumar, S., & Schmitz, S. (2011). Managing recalls in a consumer product supply chain–root cause analysis and measures to mitigate risks. International Journal of Production Research, 49(1), 235-253.

Kotter, J. (2013). Management is (still) not leadership. Harvard Business Review, 9.

Madsen, S. R., John, C. R., & Miller, D. (2014). Readiness for Change.

Sanchez, L. & Blanco, B. (2014) ‘Three decades of continuous improvement’, Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 25 (9/10) pp. 986-1001.

Torres, E. N., Stylos, N., Gallarza, M. G., & McGinley, S. P. (2015). CrossRef citations Altmetric. Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management.

Tudor, L. (2014, November). Change management–challenge and opportunity for sustainable development of Romanian companies. In Proceedings of the International Management Conference, Faculty of Management, Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania (Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 466-476).

Vakola, M. (2014). What’s in there for me? Individual readiness to change and the perceived impact of organizational change. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 35(3), 195-209