Jeff Boss’s article “4 Ways To Help Your Team Adapt To Change” presents us with four different ways of handling a change through the way we work within our teams. These include exploring competencies, matching talent to task, eliminating rank and becoming project based. Each one of these methods works differently, however, they ensure smooth operations in the face of change.
Consider one of these methods which means – Handling changes in a project based manner, the team should work in coherence and a single organism. For this to be achieved, every person is identified with contextual knowledge and entrusted with tasks associated with the same. This will ensure clear distribution of duties can happen while ensuring efficient handling of a change. Such an approach will maximize the team’s throughput.
Let us consider an organization that has been brought over by another – renamed and transferred to another company, there is a need for all transitions related activities to be handled and any lapse even in a single part of this might lead to a legal or financial liability. Here projects are formed for separate sets of tasks and teams to carry them out identified as:
Physical Transition Project – to handle all the physical company name changes, including stationery, advertisements on newspapers and billboards, company name boards and the like
Electronic Data Transition Project – to handle all electronic forms of the company related details like website, mail domain, URLs, etc.
Legal and Financial Transition Project – to handle all legal documents like agreements, NDAs, RFPs; Financial aspects like Billing System, bank accounts, monetary transactions and so on.
Given the above example, it is clear that breaking the change related tasks into a project mode and assigning relevantly skilled people ensures there are no tasks forgotten or overlooked. This will go a long way in efficient handling of a change and its implications on the organization. This is by far one of the most foolproof ways of handling change effectively.
References
Boss, Jeff. (2014). 4 Ways To Help Your Team Adapt To Change, Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffboss/2014/08/28/4-ways-to-help-your-team-adapt-to-change/
