Understanding change in changing times
In an ever changing world the challenge of managing risk can appear daunting. Whatever the ‘badge’ of the current initiative (business process reengineering, lean enterprise, e-business, right sizing, succession planning, etc.) the result is change; to what the business does and how it does it. These changes, if not effectively managed, can undermine the risk management process and erode the resilience of organisations and their ability to deal with unplanned incidents and events. An organisation may believe it has good risk management controls in place but changes may have removed or undermined them.
In order for risk controls to be effective they must be maintained and managed, which requires competent personnel. Organisations have a responsibility to their stakeholders to ensure that they are, and remain, competent to operate, particularly in the area of public and personnel safety where there are legal obligations to be met.
In highly regulated industries there are very clear responsibilities placed on operators. For example, in the civil nuclear industry, Licence Condition 36 requires licensees to “… make and implement adequate arrangements to control any changes to its organisational structure or resources which may affect safety.”
Managing change and providing ongoing assurance that an organisation is competent to discharge its legal obligations and meet its business objectives is an increasing priority in the modern business world. The ability to assess quickly the impact of proposed changes, before they happen, is a key management challenge.
SKILLS XP – HELPING TO MANAGE COMPETENCE AND CHANGE
To support organisations in meeting these challenges, Risktec and our sister company Tritanium have developed SkillsXP. This bespoke database tool promotes a structured approach to managing organisational change and competency requirements.
Key features include:
- recording organisational roles and responsibilities
- recording tasks undertaken by the organisation
- identifying and assessing required competencies
- identifying roles and tasks assigned to personnel
- assessing the effectiveness of training in supporting competency requirements
Once the organisation baseline has been captured, SkillsXP becomes a very powerful tool to:
- manage competency assessment and training requirements
- identify when re-certification is required
- gain a detailed understanding of organisational strengths and areas for improvement
- assess the impact of proposed organisational or business changes
- identify competency development and training requirements associated with proposed changes
Many organisations will hold all the information needed for managing competence. However it is often held in various locations across the organisation, in a mixture of formats and media. This makes the change assessment and management process inefficient and often confusing. By bringing the information together into a common system such as SkillsXP, in a systematic and structured way, then the process of change management becomes much less daunting.
LESSONS LEARNED
Having used SkillsXP to support a number of major organisations we would advise the following:
- Ensure that organisational objectives are clear and well understood.
- Ensure that roles and responsibilities are tightly defined to meet organisational objectives.
- Ensure tasks undertaken by the organisation are well defined.
- Ensure that competency requirements are tied to roles and tasks.
- Ensure that training is targeted to support specific competencies.
- Assure yourself that personnel who fulfil the roles have the required level of competency, or there is a plan to achieve it.
- Avoid defining roles and responsibilities to simply reflect the skills of the personnel currently in position. By fitting personnel to the organisation, the organisation is much more flexible and the management of change more straightforward.
IN CONCLUSION
Adopting a well structured approach to organisational change enables organisations to assess and manage change and assure themselves and other stakeholders that the organisation remains competent to discharge its responsibilities. SkillsXP is a powerful database tool which supports this structured approach and helps manage the complex information held by large organisations. SkillsXP has been developed over the years in close collaboration with major companies, resulting in a stable and effective tool to support competency and management of change.
This article first appeared in RISKworld Issue 8.
