Managing Change Enquiry and Action

This aims of this chapter are to:

• show how processes relate to other aspects of organizations, such as people and structures;

• locate process-oriented change research within the literature; and

• introduce basic techniques for process mapping and suggest ways in which process changes might draw on such modelling approaches.

As discussed in Chapter 7, it is apparent that as organizations grow they begin to formalize the way in which business is conducted, because all organizations reach a size at which an informal approach is no longer tenable. Everything from recruiting staff and choosing suppliers to designing products and managing quality can be described in terms of the sequence of activities involved. The larger, more established and more complex the organization is, the more formal the documentation of such activities can become, and many large organizations have lengthy documentation setting out the way in which tasks are accomplished. Whilst this is sometimes necessary for accreditation purposes, such as ISO 9001, such descriptions can be cumbersome. Partly because such documentation is long and detailed and has a number of interconnects with other aspects of organizational life, it can be very challenging to introduce change. Change to approved, accredited or simply familiar ways of doing things might need to involve multiple stakeholders (see Chapter 5) and can be time-consuming.