Initiating an Organizational Change Management Process: Achieving Service Quality in Emerging Economies

Introduction

World class businesses and organizations have gone extra miles to improve organizational efficiency and transform themselves to maintain a steady lead on innovation. Types of these organizations range from electronic, manufacturing and automobile to service sectors like utility companies and non-profit organizations. One important theme the great organizations have in common is they are constantly hungry for continuous improvement and innovation through an effective change management system.

Some of the persistent challenges that many organizations, mostly in the developing countries, face on a daily basis can be attributed to lack of having a process based approach to inject new innovation and change in the area of their core capabilities or ancillary operations. Creating a new process or making an incremental change of an existing one takes enormous amount of creative thinking, re-engineering, leadership spirit and sets of iterative activities involving several levels of expertise. Achieving system maturity is a continuous and on-going effort for the companies and organizations. Often, bottlenecks are built up over the time and add inefficiencies. This can impede an organization’s ability to deliver quality service to its customers. It is highly desirable that organizations try to identify the bottlenecks and eliminate them effectively by establishing principles of change management. The success in accomplishing internal process improvement is crucial for an organization to remain effective and competitive in delivering the best services to its customers. The subject of the content is to highlight key criteria for initiating a change management process to inject new innovation and change to the organizational practices. It further introduces key topics for building an effective change management process in an Indian context, also demonstrating how an established change management approach can benefit the society in a larger context in multi-pronged way. Among the key points here, the chapter stresses on ‘how a modern change management approach could play a significant role in building a well-organized system and contribute to continuous improvement without a radical overhaul primarily in the developing economies’. An organization can use these principles and practices to adopt change and evaluate the organization’s ability to take up the change strategically primarily in an emerging economy like India.