Risk Based Approach for Change Management

Most organisations strive for improvement and want to challenge the status quo and introduce change-large or small. Often the motivation comes from peer group firms. Research suggests that only 20% of the change management projects succeed. Often organisations introduce more than one initiative at a time. While the cause of failure of the change management projects differs from organisation to organisation but there is a common cause as well-organisations do not consider project risk management in case of change management. Based on field experience and taking examples from the literature, the authors present a risk-based approach for change management in this paper. As evidence, examples from field experience have been cited to strengthen the views presented. The process of risk management has been divided in different phases as per Deming's PDCA approach. In each phase the potential risks arise due to assumptions made, explicitly or implicitly, has been discussed and the mitigating steps that may be initiated has been suggested - instead of giving exact points rather the approach has been presented. Risk based approach for change management will force management to look at the risks at every stage and look for evidences to check the validity of the assumptions. It may take time to roll out a change management initiative, but definitely it will reduce the chances of failure and save the organization from cascading effects of failure. Evidence based management will compel the top management to look at the peer group and examine the cause and effect relationship of good cases and bad cases.