Seven steps to successful change, or How can a company start making money again?

    There is always a compelling reason behind the need for change. However, most organizations either react too slowly, or never adjust their business model and/or their operational practices. As a result, a great number of businesses, who once thrived, fail because they neglect or ignore to go through the change process that their competitors have gone through, or adjust to market demands.

     What is alarming is that the window of opportunity to adjust and change is much narrower than what it used to be. Globalization and the Internet communication and commerce revolution have caused the window of opportunity to be as narrow as a few months, in some cases.

     Change is a complex process, fraught with land mines. Navigating these land mines and accomplishing the desired change, the first time around, will act as your company's collective wisdom and corporate culture melting-pot.

     Some may argue a different sequence of steps, or even different steps to affect change. But I believe following these seven steps will substantially increase your company's chances of success.

    1- Examine your Business Model (more on "business model")
The process begins examining your organization's business model. Simply stated, the business model is a representation of how an organization makes (or intends to make) money.

     Clarity of goal, vision, and business model is a pre-requisite to success, and precedes any operational or tactical steps.

     You may need some assistance in defining, or re-defining your organization's purpose, offerings, customers, strategies, infrastructure, structures, trading practices, and operational processes and policies. The outcome of this step is a crisp document that your company's leaders agree to, and get excited about, as their guiding light to achieving success.

    2- Establishing a Baseline (Where are you today?)
This step is performed with the business principals, along with the line managers. The goal is to discover the "State of the Union", or taking inventory of where your business stands.

During this step, you need to survey and document your key operational, financial and technology processes. This will serve as "Point A" in your journey to success

    3- Formation of a Lead Team
Now that you know where you are, and where you want to go, the next thing is to form a lead team, whose responsibility is the execution of these plans.

At this step, you need a facilitator to assist with the formation of the lead team, as well as making sure that each team member is on the right seat; that is, responsible for the a set of tasks that is most suited for his or her skills, and can add the best value in this role

    4- Creating an Action Plan
The next step is for the lead team to create a high-level action plan. This action plan will be the foundation for the detailed actions and project plans that the Operational Teams will undertake.

Communicating and selling: Once the action plan is created, it is critical that this plan is communicated and sold throughout the organization, and in some cases, outside of the organization. A key component of the communication plan is to create a sense of urgency, and articulate compelling reasons for change.

    5- Forming the Operational Teams
The operational teams are what transform strategy and planning into actionable tasks, and execute for results. In this hands-on phase, it is important that the right people are assigned to the right tasks, and that team chemistry is going to create synergy

    6- Putting the plan to action
Once action plans are translated to project plans and the tasks defined, it is very important to achieve early wins. These wins act to show business value, energize employees and management, and silence the critics.

    7- Continuous improvement/ Course correction
Change is not a one time deal. You must continuously learn from what you have accomplished and what didn't work, and take corrective action whenever needed. You also need to apply what you have learned to improve your process, enhance people skills, and leverage technology to serve you better.