Most people working in project management will be familiar with Kotter’s 8 Step change model. It sits at the heart of both understanding and managing the change process.
But whereas change may have been considered a step-process when Kotter originally devised the 8 Step model in his 1995 book ‘Leading Change’, digital transformation has resulted in an age where change is now ‘business as usual,’ a continual iteration of development, adaptations and reform.
Change is now embedded at a cultural level and needs to be implemented in every tier of the business, as ‘top-down’ simply won’t cut it. Everyone in your organisation understands that change needs to happen, but without ownership at the right levels, it becomes someone else’s problem, and therefore, fails before it has even begun.
As Kotter said “The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people”*
At Reed Professional Services our core focus is on helping complex organisations manage change, be that at technological or operational levels (most often the 2 are inextricably intertwined). We work in harmony with our customers’ existing teams to facilitate the change process, understanding that this process is ever evolving and that always, the people of the project must come first.
*John P. Kotter, Dan Cohen (2013). “The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations”, p.11, Harvard Business Press
