Change is an action that an organization conducts in order to alter the way the firm operates. These changes may be small and only impact some aspect of daily activity among workers—or they may be large and completely alter the aspect of the company and its approach to business. For an IT firm, change management will have an after-effect just as it will in any other organization. This paper will provide a review of what has been written on change management and its after-effects in IT.
One of the after-effects of change management is a change in workplace culture (Perkins, 2018). If employees are not ready for the alteration in the culture of the workplace, they could demonstrate resistance. Resistance is a significant after-effect of change management and in IT, it can lead to workers deliberately opposing infrastructural plans for development and change as well as some workers leaving the organization altogether in opposition to the change. Focusing on employee retention and the factors that compel workers to remain committed to their IT firm during the process of change management is something that should receive attention in order to lessen the potential after-effect of resistance, which can lead to higher turnover and other negative fallout from the change.
Part of the management of after-effects is the “ability to manage fear” as Walker (2018) puts it (p. 30). Managing fear, according to Walker (2018) is “what change management is about” (p. 30). Fear plays such a large role in how change impacts people: they fear what they do not know. So for an IT firm engaged in a change management process, it is necessary for managers to educated personnel on what the change is, why it is important, what outcome is desired, and why the change will help the company overall. The more that is explained about the change, the more personnel will be willing to embrace it. Education helps to eliminate ignorance, which is the main basis of fear. So in the process of managing fear, managers of an IT department or firm must be able to educate the workers on the reason for the change in the first place. The more logical and rational the change process can be made to seem, the less fear will result and the less likely resistance is to be an after-effect. The main way to face the...
31). The way to do this is to make a careful evaluation of every aspect of the change—namely, to address what is expected of the IT team, to identify the goals and objectives of the team so that everyone is on the same page, to monitor the change process so that everyone is abreast of how it is going and whether it is meeting resistance or whether there are any obstacles that have to be addressed, and so on.
Another after-effect of change management in the IT sector can be “stalled transformation,” as Anand and Barsoux (2017) describe it. This means that instead of lasting change occurring, there is a hiccup in the change process once the process has begun and the change enacted. Like a car that starts up and runs for a mile or so but then stalls out, the change management process can at first seem like it is running on all cylinders—but then something happens and the change process stops working altogether. Workers go back to doing things the old way. All the work and preparation and planning and initiative that went in to getting the change up and running now seems all for nothing. There are many different reasons the change process can stall, according to Anand and Barsoux (2017). Just like with a car that has multiple working parts, an organization has several aspects to it and the change management process in IT has to consider them all in order to be successful. For example, if the change management team does not take into consideration the finer points of the enterprise and looks only to make deep cuts so as to facilitate a change in structure, they run the risk of deflating the workplace stamina—sometimes, in fact, the “cuts are so deep that they hollow out capabilities, sap morale, and remove the slack that could have fueled new endeavors” (Anand & Barsoux, 2017, p. 3). In a situation where the change management team is unaware of the risks of the change being implemented, the after-effects can be particularly damaging.
Positive after-effects of change management in the IT sector can be achieved of course as well. As Cross (2001) points out, change has to receive support from the both…
