Many people think operations are a simple thing. Just a bunch of people moving things around and lots of time to do it, so what’s the fuss about changing something over there? Well, it really isn’t like that. In fact, assuring that a modification at the operations level succeeds is a daunting task and if you don’t focus on managing that change you’re better off if you don’t do it at all. Read on to discover why change management in operations is a top-level item in your priority list.
Any operation landscape with a reasonable level of complexity handles serious volumes of information with very limited margin for mistakes. This is normally worsened when the underlying business has regulatory or compliance constraints that increase the pressure in getting things right.
Assuming that you can change whatever you want, whenever you want without considering the underlying risks of such a change is a serious mistake. What are then the most important things that prompt you to seriously manage any change in an operational landscape?
- Integration: Any operational landscape is a result of complex information flows that span multiple areas in the organization. From planning to sales, from production to customer service, operations need to deliver based on constraints and rules that sometimes are hidden in the organization. Assuming that you can change a process in an operation without seriously and rigorously inspecting all integration impacts across the organization is probably going to derail you.
- Continuity: Even when the purpose of change is precisely to improve capacity (whatever that capacity may be, from space to throughput, you name it), any change induced in a rolling machine can cause it to breakdown. As an operational landscape is a complex machine involving people, processes and equipment, any subtle change on the ongoing way of working can have negative impacts on the installed capacity and, therefore, on the actual capacity of your landscape. Adjusting your change to minimize impacts on the installed capacity and having a contingency plan to deal with unforeseen results is a critical aspect of assuring the machine does not breakdown.
- Compliance: The bottom line is that compliance is enforced by your operational landscape. This means that the most fundamental things in your business, regardless of customer contract SLAs or regulatory constraints, depend on the effectiveness that is assured by your operations. Changing your operations means that you may compromise your compliance requirements, endangering your business and prompting you to take emergency actions to recover fundamental aspects of your operation. Assuring that compliance requirements are properly managed within the scope of changing your operations is a critical aspect that may well prevent critical disruptions in your business.
At Processware we take change management very seriously. So much so that our flagship platform O2P was designed to assure incremental modification to critical processes and operations, mitigating the risk of inducing any change. Furthermore, O2P provides instant, real time visibility over your operational landscape processes so that you can monitor disruptions during change implementation before they become critical. This means that you are automatically putting in place contingency measures to anticipate risk induced by change. You can check out more information about O2P and it’s continuous change support here.
