Question

Analyze hard and soft approaches to change management

Answer 1

Analyze hard and soft approaches to change management:

‘Hard’ elements of change are the tasks within change management, which are defined and measured. whereas ‘Soft’ factors, such as culture and motivation, may be more difficult to assess. Emphasis may be placed upon managing task factors at the expense of soft factors during change interventions, however, "Sirkin et al " argue that four hard factors correlate to the outcome of change interventions, that are-- duration (length of time), integrity (reliance on managers), commitment (of all involved in change), and effort (within the opportunity of time allowed). When characterising change, we have considered the speed and magnitude of change, and related this to the problem of complexity. The problems that change present to an organisation can be perceived by managers as ‘difficulties’, which are ‘bounded’ in that they can be well defined or specified and can be dealt with without involving or impacting on the wider organisation. Another category of problems are those which cannot be well defined and are ‘unbounded’ in the sense that the wider organisation is implicated and needs to be involved in dealing with these types of problems.

Hard System Change Model is a method to achieve organizational change configuration and its management which has been created and developed based on the methods of analysis and change associated with the engineering of the systems and project management. This model provides a rigorous and systematic determination of objectives for change and is used especially in situations where quantitative criteria can be used to test the options for change, but it is still possible to use qualitative criteria. The authors differentiated the stages of hard approach to organizational change, presenting a continuous line on the borders of problem or opportunity  and implementation , that occur in the real world, while the remaining steps are dashed frames to indicate that they are thinking processes.

The change approach, which takes into consideration that many change situations involve “people issues” (leadership, culture and politics) is Soft System Change.Different softer approaches to solve problems have been proposed by several specialists and have been developed later.